John Tranter

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John Tranter bigraphy, stories - Contemporary Australian poet and editor

John Tranter : biography

29 April 1943 –

John Ernest Tranter (born 1943) is an Australian poet, publisher and editor. He has published more than twenty books of poetry; devising, with Jan Garrett, the long running ABC radio program Books and Writing; and founding in 1997 the internet quarterly literary magazine Jacket which he published and edited until 2010, when he gave it to the University of Pennsylvania.Jacket2

The Australia Council awarded him a Creative Arts Fellowship in 1990; some Australian poets "acknowledge his role as innovator and experimentalist".Wilde et al. (1994)

Life

Tranter was born in Cooma, New South Wales and attended country schools, then took his BA in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He has worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, making more than twenty reading tours to venues in the U.S., Britain and Europe since the mid-1980s. He has lived in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia, and overseas in London, Cambridge, Singapore, Florida, and San Francisco. He now lives in Sydney, where he is a company director (with his wife Lyn) of Australian Literary Management, a leading literary agency. He is married to Lyn, with adult children Kirsten and Leon, and in 2009 completed a Doctorate of Creative Arts University of Wollongong (conferred, highly commended).

Selected bibliography

  • 1970: Parallax, South Head Press
  • 1973: Red Movie and other poems, Angus & Robertson
  • 1973: The Blast Area Gargoyle Poets number 13), Makar Press
  • 1976: The Alphabet Murders (notes from a work in progress), Angus & Robertson
  • 1977: Crying in Early Infancy: 100 Sonnets, Makar Press
  • 1979: Dazed in the Ladies Lounge, Island Press (Australia)
  • 1983: Selected Poems, Hale & Iremonger
  • 1993: Under Berlin, University of Queensland Press
  • 1993: The Floor of Heaven, HarperCollins/Angus & Robertson
  • 1993: At The Florida, University of Queensland Press
  • 1998: Late Night Radio Polygon Press
  • 2006: Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected, University of Queensland Press
  • 2010: Starlight: 150 Poems, University of Queensland Press

As editor

  • 2007: The Best Australian Poetry 2007, guest editor, University of Queensland Press
  • 2011: The Best Australian Poems 2011, editor, Black Ink, Melbourne
  • 2012: The Best Australian Poems 2012, editor, Black Ink, Melbourne

Literary career

In 1975 John Tranter co-designed the first Books & Writing radio program for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a program format which was still going strong thirty years later. During 1987 and 1988 John Tranter was in charge of the ABC Radio National weekly two-hour arts program Radio Helicon, and from 1990 to 1993 he was the poetry editor of the Sydney-based business/ arts weekly The Bulletin.

He has received many fellowships and other grants, and has been a visiting scholar at various institutions, from Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University to writer-in-residence at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida and at Cambridge University in England. He has published over twenty volumes of poetry, including Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2006) and Starlight: 150 Poems (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2010).

His Starlight: 150 Poems, published by the University of Queensland Press, won the Queensland State Literary Award for poetry and the Age Book of the Year award for poetry in 2011, and Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected, published by the University of Queensland Press, won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for poetry in 2006, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize in 2007, the South Australian Premier’s Awards John Bray prize for poetry in 2008 and the South Australian Premier’s Awards Premier’s Prize for the best book overall (2006 and 2007) in 2008. His Under Berlin, published by the University of Queensland Press, won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (the New South Wales State Literary Award for Poetry) in 1989, and At The Florida won the Melbourne Age ‘Book of the Year’ award for poetry in 1993. Other recent books are The Floor of Heaven (Harper Collins, 1992), a book-length sequence of four verse narratives, the poetry collections Late Night Radio (Polygon, Edinburgh, UK, 1998), Heart Print (Salt, Cambridge, UK, 2001), Different Hands (Folio/ Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Cambridge and Western Australia, 1998), a collection of seven experimental computer-assisted prose pieces, Borrowed Voices (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2002), a dozen reinterpretations of poems by other poets, Studio Moon and Trio (both Salt Publications, UK, 2003).