Laurie Duggan
Author photo by Rosemary Hunter.
Shearsman Titles
The Ash Range
Compared to What – Selected Poems 1971-2003
About the author
Laurie Duggan (b. 1949) was born in Melbourne and has lived in Sydney and Brisbane. He has published numerous books of poems including The Ash Range (since republished by Shearsman – see link above), which won the Victorian Premier's New Writing Award; The Epigrams of Martial, winner of the Wesley Michael Wright Prize; Mangroves, selected as The Age Poetry Book of the Year in 2003, and winner of the 2004 ASAL Gold Medal; and Compared to What: Selected Poems 1971–2003, (see link above). His cultural history Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture, 1901–1939, was published by University of Queensland Press in 2001. He was poetry editor of Meanjin from 1994 to 1997. Until recently he was a Senior Lecturer/ Writer-in-Residence in the School of Arts, Media and Culture at Griffith University in Brisbane and an Honorary Research Advisor in the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Queensland, but moved home in the summer of 2006 to south-east England. See his author page on Australian Literature Resources here.
"Mr Duggan is a stylist in an area of poetry where style is notoriously
difficult to maintain . . . a form which demands absolute sureness of touch
if it is not to collapse like a shattered mosaic. His lyrics of circumstance
. . . catch the tone and peculiarity of urban Australia convincingly .
. . He makes structures which are more than the facts and opinions they
employ. That, I think, is poetry."
— Peter Porter
"Duggan's technical and emotional range, his grasp of history and ability to let the record stand – all take on a richness and freshness rare in local poetry." — Carl Harrison-Ford, Sydney Morning Herald.