 | John Tranter, International Literature Festival, Berlin, September 2002 John Tranter, International Literature Festival, Berlin, September 2002 |  | |
More accolades for John Tranter
2008 South Australian writing prizes
Adelaide Writers’ Week was launched on Sunday 2nd March as part of the 2008 Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts, and with it came more awards for Faculty of Creative Arts Doctoral candidate in Creative Writing, John Tranter.
Tranters volume of poetry Urban Myths: 210 Poems won both the 2008 South Australian Premier's Award for best book overall (valued at $10,000) and the Writers' Week 2008 John Bray Poetry Award (valued at $15,000).
In taking out the South Australian awards, Tranter has now received a hat-trick of state prizes for this publication, adding to the 2007 NSW Premier’s award and the Victorian Premier’s award for poetry received in 2006.
John Tranter (65) was born in Cooma, NSW and first developed an interest in poetry in his teens writing his first poem at age 16. That poem was published in the school magazine and won him ‘best’ prize of £5 launching a dazzling writing career which spans more than 30 years and includes twenty published books of poetry.
Of this work, the South Australian John Bray Poetry Award judges’ report states: “Complex and sophisticated, this collection reflects the protean nature of mind, its amplitude and resilience. The poems are linguistically and intellectually sinuous and move with mercurial speed. Society is scrutinized, sardonically challenged and affirmed, and the self is part of the kaleidoscopic spill of surfaces and angles. Different voices and planes play together into the improvised melodies of jazz; characterisation, observation and memory produce haunting, dissonant chords. The poems are complex, tough and cheeky even as they are fluid and exalting. The mood can be edgy and dark, or lighter in tone, witty to downright funny, often with a cinematic or surreal video-clip quality. The later poems, particularly, use dislocation and randomness to create compelling otherworlds of words.” (judges: Nicholas Jose [chair], Stephen Lawrence, Jan Owen)
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.
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