Join Robyn Rowland AO for a poetry reading and discussion with guests Lisa Gorton and Andy Jackson

Lisa Gorton:

Dr Lisa Gorton’s first poetry collection, Press Release, was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award and the Mary Gilmore Award, and won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. Lisa completed a doctorate at Oxford University on John Donne’s poetry and prose, winning the John Donne Society Award for Best Publication in Donne Studies. She received the inaugural Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Her novel for children, Cloudland, was one of The Age Books of the Year in 2009. Of Press Release:  At the heart of Lisa Gorton’s first collection of poems is a sequence set in the Mallee district of Victoria in the last years of World War II. A meditation on ambition, patience and waste, it explores the experience of first settlement through elegy, dramatic monologue, the portrait poem and the short lyric. Other poems are set in cities and in the future. Written in a contemporary baroque style, combining farfetched imagery with intense emotion, this is poetry that leaps out of elaboration into clear air and light.

Andy Jackson:

Andy Jackson's poetry explores embodiment, identity and difference.  His poem Secessionist won the 2008 Arts ACT Rosemary Dobson award for Best Unpublished Poem.  In 2009, he and Rachael Guy won the Most Innovative Work award at the Overload Poetry Festival for a poetry-puppetry collaborative performance.  He was an Emerging Writer in Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Perth in 2010.  Andy's first full-length collection of poems, Among the Regulars, was published by papertiger media in 2010, and was Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award and Shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.  In late 2011, he was an Asialink literature resident in Chennai, India, with the support of the Australia-India Council, where he began a series of poems exploring the personal stories behind the medical tourism industry.