Barry Hill
Shearsman Titles
About the author
Barry Hill was born in Melbourne in 1943, and completed his
tertiary education in Melbourne and London, where he worked an educational
psychologist and a journalist. He has been writing full time since 1975,
living by the sea in Queenscliff, Victoria. He has won major national awards
for poetry, history and the essay. Penguin and Faber have anthologized his
short fiction, and stories have been translated into Chinese and Japanese.
He has written many pieces for radio. His libretto, Love Strong as Death was
performed at The Studio, at the Sydney Opera House in 2004.
Broken Song: T G H Strehlow
and Aboriginal Possession (Knopf, 2002), his magnum opus on Australian
poetics, which won a National Biography Award and the 2004 Tasman-Pacific Bi-Centennial
Prize for History, has been described as 'one of the great Australian
books'; it was reviewed in the TLS in 2003. His poetry has been published
in the Kenyon Review, The Literary Review and Agenda, as
well as the major literary magazines in Australia, including the annual anthologies, Best
Australian Poems. In 2008 he won the prestigious Judith Wright Prize for
his reflections on revolutionary romanticism, Necessity: Poems 1996-2006. Along
with As We Draw Ourselves (2007) this book also includes his responses
to living in Italy, and his Buddhist travels in India and East Asia. Lines
for Birds (2011) is a collaboration with the painter, John Wolseley. Naked
Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, is his ninth collection.
Between 1998 and 2008 he was Poetry Editor of the
national newspaper, The Australian and between 2005 and 2008 he was
a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is currently the
recipient of an Australia Council Fellowship, which enables him to spend time
in Kyoto and Calcutta while writing a book called The Peace Pagoda,
about the travels of Rabindranath Tagore in Japan.