John Kinsella (born 1963) is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. His writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an "international regionalism" in his approach to place. He has also frequently worked in collaboration with other writers, artists and musicians.

Early life and work

Kinsella was born in Perth, Western Australia. His mother was a poet and he began writing poetry as a child. He cites Judith Wright among his early influences. Before becoming a full-time writer, teacher and editor he worked in a variety of places, including laboratories, a fertiliser factory and on farms.

Later poetry and writing

Kinsella has published at least fifty books and his many awards include three Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the 2008 Christopher Brennan Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for poetry (twice) and the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry.

His poems have appeared in journals such as Stand, The Times Literary Supplement, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books and Antipodes. His poetry collections include: Poems 1980-1994, The Silo, The Undertow: New & Selected Poems, Visitants (1999), Wheatlands (with Dorothy Hewett, 2000) and The Hierarchy of Sheep (2001). His book, Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems, includes an introduction by Harold Bloom and his poetry collection, The New Arcadia, was published in June 2005. Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems appeared in 2016, and Insomnia in 2019. After these came the first two volumes of his collected poems: The Ascension of Sheep (2021) and Harsh Hakea (2022). He has also written plays, short stories and the novels Genre and Post-colonial. and Visiting DAAD Professor in English at University of Tübingen, Germany.

Kinsella's manuscripts are housed in the University of Western Australia, the National Library of Australia, the University of New South Wales, Kenyon College and the University of Leeds. The main collection is in Special Collections in the University of Western Australia Library.

Kinsella's 2010 book, Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley, was published by Liverpool University Press and was edited by Niall Lucy.

Work as an editor and critic

Kinsella is a founding editor of the literary journal Salt, and was international editor of The Kenyon Review. He co-edited a special issue on Australian poetry for the American journal Poetry and various other issues of international journals. He was a poetry critic for The Observer and is an editorial consultant for Westerly.

He is editor of the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), and co-editor with Tracy Ryan of the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (2017).

and Beyond Ambiguity (2021). In these he posits his theory of

"international regionalism" and "polysituatedness". The recent critical work Legibility: an anti-fascist poetics extends Kinsella's

thinking around the intersections of pacifism, protest, human rights,

animal rights, environmentalism, anarchism, veganism and the role of poetry in resisting fascism.

Kinsella is a frequent contributor, both of poetry and criticism, to the Australian newspaper The Saturday Paper

See also

  • Anarchism in Australia

Bibliography

Poetry

Collections

Selected list of poems

{|class='wikitable sortable' width='90%'

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!width=25%|Title

!|Year

!|First published

!|Reprinted/collected

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|The Fable of the Great Sow

|2012

|

|

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|Fall of windchime

|

|

|

|-

|Hiss

|2014

|

|

|-

|}

Novels

  • Genre (1997)
  • Post-colonial (2009)
  • Lucida Intervalla (2018)
  • Hollow Earth (2019)
  • Hotel Impossible (2020)
  • Cellnight: a verse novel (2023)
  • The Argonautica Inlandica (2023)
  • Mahler Erasures (2024)

Short fiction

;Collections

  • Conspiracies (2003)
  • In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012)
  • Tide (Transit Lounge, 2013)
  • Crow's Breath and Other Stories (Transit Lounge, 2015)
  • Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017)
  • Pushing Back (2021)
  • Beam of Light (Transit Lounge, 2024)

Plays

Non-fiction

;Autobiography / memoir

;Essays and reporting

;Miscellaneous

Interviews

  • "The Poetry Kit Interviews John Kinsella", 1998 [https://web.archive.org/web/20080512024827/http://www.poetrykit.org/iv98/kinsella.htm]
  • Overland literary journal, interviewed by Tracy Ryan, 24 November 2008
  • Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, #55-56, 2024, interviewed by Van Ikin.

Awards

  • 1993 Full Fathom Five, Western Australian Premier's Book Awards — Poetry, winner
  • 1996 The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony, Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, winner
  • 1996 The Undertow : New and Selected Poems, Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, winner
  • 1998 The Hunt and Other Poems, Western Australian Premier's Book Awards — Poetry, joint winner
  • 1998 The Hunt and Other Poems, The Age Book of the Year Award — Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize, winner
  • 2003 Peripheral Light : New and Selected Poems, Western Australian Premier's Book Awards — Poetry, winner
  • 2006 The New Arcadia, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards — Judith Wright Calanthe Prize for Poetry, winner
  • 2012 Armour, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards — Prize for Poetry, winner
  • 2012 The Jaguar's Dream, Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, joint winner
  • 2013 Jam Tree Gully: Poems, Queensland Literary Awards — Judith Wright Calanthe Prize for Poetry, winner

References

  • 'X Marks the Parataxis: Louis Armand, John Kinsella and Jessica L. Wilkinson' in Cordite Poetry Review.
  • 'John Kinsella's Poetics of Distraction' in Cordite Poetry Review.
  • Three poems.
  • Parrotology: On the Necessity of Parrots in Poetry essay by John Kinsella at the Australian Book Review.
  • 'America' reviewed by Abena Sutherland in poetry mag "Intercapillary Space".
  • Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist, the blog that he shares with Tracy Ryan.
  • soi 3 publicity page for Post-colonial.
  • Audio: John Kinsella reads "Rapture: Tim Discovers the Cosmos" from the book Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography (via poemsoutloud.net)
  • "John Kinsella's Shades of the Sublime and Beautiful reviewed by Nicholas Pierpan" at Tower Magazine
  • Profile at Bloodaxe Books