Media Release

Tranter wins the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry

4 June 2007

The Faculty of Creative Arts congratulates John Tranter on winning the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

The winners were announced by the Minister for the Arts, the Hon. Frank Sartor, and the NSW Premier, the Hon. Morris Iemma on 29 May 2007 in the 28th presentation of the awards.

Tranter is currently completing a Doctorate of Creative Arts in Writing at the University of Wollongong and was awarded the prestigious prize for his book Urban Myths: 210 Poems, which also received the Victorian Premier’s Prize for poetry in 2006.

Of the winning entry, the judges’ commented “This generous collection of 210 poems takes in the whole of John Tranter's dazzling career including fifty new and uncollected poems as virtuosic as anything that precedes them.

These final pages demonstrate the continuously innovative and international character of Tranter's poetry, as well as its finely tuned responsiveness to the particularities of Australian idiom and experience. In Tranter's hands, poetry, and language itself, is never straightforward but always a matter of delight and critical inquiry. Tranter's devastating wit has evolved over time, but the daring and implicit humour of the enterprise has been constant. Combining tremendous technical fluency with a restless, experimental drive, Tranter delves into ‘popular mysteries' and iconic characters, the irony of the everyday and ‘the vernacular of the shopping channel'. Tranter's seemingly effortless command of the resources of form, speech, character and story, energizes his poetry and stimulates his readers, counterbalancing the melancholy of ‘grief, in small allotments' with the ‘gift factory' of poetic invention.”

John Tranter was born in Cooma, NSW and first developed an interest in poetry in his late teens.  He has published twenty books of poetry in a writing career that spans more than 30 years.

To read select pages from Urban Myths: 210 Poems and learn more about John Tranter’s writing visit http://johntranter.com/00/index.html

or see

Urban Myths: 210 poems, University of Queensland Press, 2006. 322 pages.

ISBN-0-7022-3557-1, paperback
UQP’s Internet site: http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/

Publisher’s cover blurb: Urban Myths: 210 Poems brings the best work to date from a poet considered one of the most original of his generation in Australia, together with a generous selection of new work. Smart, wry and very stylish, John Tranter’s poems investigate the vagaries of perception and the ability of language to converge life, imagination and art so that we arrive, unexpectedly, at the deepest human mysteries.