Joseph Dolce is an American-Australian singer/songwriter, poet and essayist who achieved international recognition with his multi-million-selling song, "Shaddap You Face", released under the name of his one-man show, Joe Dolce Music Theatre, worldwide, in 1980–1981.
Alec Derwent Hope was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic. He was referred to in an American journal as "the 20th century's greatest 18th-century poet".
Geoffrey Donald Page is an Australian poet, translator, teacher and jazz enthusiast.
Leslie Allan Murray was an Australian poet, anthologist, and critic. His career spanned over 40 years and he published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. Translations of Murray's poetry have been published in 11 languages: French, German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Hindi, Russian, and Dutch. Murray’s poetry won many awards and he is regarded as "the leading Australian poet of his generation". He was rated in 1997 by the National Trust of Australia as one of the 100 Australian Living Treasures.
Canberra is home to a number of important musical venues and institutions, including the Llewellyn Hall performance venue, part of the Australian National University School of Music, and a number of music festivals including Canberra International Music Festival, Canberra Country Blues & Roots Festival and the National Folk Festival. The local music scene includes many bars and nightclubs for local performers, mostly clustered in Dickson, Kingston and the City Centre.
Australian performance poetry is not a recent phenomenon in English-speaking Australia. It would not be beyond credibility to identify Henry Lawson as Australia's first professional performance poet, but there had been many performance poets in Australia prior to Lawson from the First Fleet onwards. In fact prior to 1890 most poetry in Australia was received orally. The Sydney Bulletin began a campaign of publishing Australian poetry in the 1890s,
The 'nationalistic' element fostered overtly at times by Stephens and the Bulletin is indicated in Stephen's review on 15th February 1896, in which he joined Lawson with Paterson as two writers who, 'with all their imperfections' mark 'something like the beginnings of a national school of poetry. In them, for the first time, Australia has found audible voice and characteristic expression'.
Alan Gould is a contemporary Australian novelist, essayist and poet.
The ACT Writing and Publishing Awards are an Australian literary award presented by the ACT Writers Centre for the best books in the categories of non-fiction, fiction, poetry and children's literature written in the Canberra region. They have been awarded since 2004. The winners in each category receive a $500 prize.
Rory Steele is an Australian author and former public servant and diplomat.
Tim Metcalf is an Australian poet and doctor and has been described as one of Australia's most published doctor-poets.
Stephen Matthews is an Australian author and publisher.
Stephen Edgar is an Australian poet, editor and indexer.
Timoshenko Aslanides was an Australian poet.
Ross Clark is an award-winning Australian poet. His poems often use strongly physical imagery and he is a strong exponent of haiku poetry.
Heinz Wolfgang Arndt was a German-born Australian economist.
Craig Cormick in an Australian science communicator and author. He was born in Wollongong in 1961, and is known for his creative writing and social research into public attitudes towards new technologies. He has lived mainly in Canberra, but has also in Iceland (1980–81) and Finland (1984–85). He has published 30 books of fiction and non-fiction, and numerous articles in refereed journals. He has been active in the Canberra writing community, teaching and editing, was Chair of the ACT Writers Centre from 2003 to 2008 and in 2006 was Writer in Residence at the University of Science in Penang, Malaysia.
John Foulcher is an Australian poet and teacher.
Melinda Smith is an Australian poet.
Stephen Kenneth Kelen, known as S. K. Kelen, is an Australian poet and educator. His father, Stephen Estaban Kelen, was a journalist and writer, and his brother, Christopher Kelen, is also a poet. S. K. Kelen began publishing poetry in 1973, when he won a Poetry Australia contest for young poets and several of his poems were published in that journal.
Paul Hetherington is an award-winning Australian poet and academic, who also worked for 19 years at the National Library of Australia. He is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra where he heads the university's International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) which he co-founded. He is an editor of the international journal Axon: Creative Explorations and co-founder of the International Prose Poetry Project.
