Vivian Smith (poet)

Last updated

Vivian Smith

BornVivian Brian Smith
(1933-06-03)3 June 1933
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Occupationpoet
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAustralian
Years active1950–
Notable worksTide Country

Vivian Brian Smith FAHA (born 3 June 1933) is an Australian poet. He is considered one of the most lyrical and observant Australian poets of his generation.

Contents

Early life

Smith was born in Hobart, Tasmania and studied French at the University of Tasmania from which he graduated with a Master of Arts. He left Tasmania in the late 1950s and has lived since then in Sydney, where he was a longtime professor at the University of Sydney until his retirement in the early 2000s. [1] He returns to Tasmania every year and his poetry is still influenced by the landscape there. Smith has published criticism as well as a bibliography of the work of Patrick White. [2] He has been an advocate of Australian literature and of many individual Australian writers.

Writing career

Smith's first book of poetry, The Other Meaning, was published in 1956 and he has since published eight further collections, among which Tide Country won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Poetry and the Grace Leven Prize. The most recent collection is Along The Line (Salt, 2007). He is a highly respected critic, having produced key studies on Australian literature and contributed much to the growth and sophistication of criticism surrounding Australian poetry. With his fellow poet and great friend, the late Noel Rowe, he published the anthology Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry (Pandanus Books 2006). [2]

Awards and recognition

Smith won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 1983 and the Patrick White Award in 1997. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998. [3]

Bibliography

Poetry collections

Anthologies

Non-fiction

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vance Palmer</span>

Edward Vivian "Vance" Palmer was an Australian novelist, dramatist, essayist and critic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nettie Palmer</span>

Janet Gertrude "Nettie" Palmer was an Australian poet, essayist and Australia's leading literary critic of her day. She corresponded with women writers and collated the Centenary Gift Book which gathered together writing by Victorian women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gwen Harwood</span> Australian poet

Gwen Harwood was an Australian poet and librettist. Harwood is regarded as one of Australia's finest poets, publishing over 420 works, including 386 poems and 13 librettos. She won numerous poetry awards and prizes, and one of Australia's most significant poetry prizes, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize is named for her. Her work is commonly studied in schools and university courses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Baylebridge</span> Australian poet (1883–1942)

William Baylebridge, born Charles William Blocksidge, was an Australian writer, poet, and political theorist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Tranter</span> Australian poet, publisher and editor (born 1943)

John Ernest Tranter 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Dransfield</span> Australian poet

Michael Dransfield was an Australian poet active in the 1960s and early 1970s who wrote close to 1,000 poems. He has been described as "one of the most widely read poets of his generation."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Wallace-Crabbe</span>

Christopher Keith Wallace-Crabbe is an Australian poet and emeritus professor in the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Les Murray (poet)</span> Australian poet and critic (1938-2019)

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.

Noel Rowe was a poet who lived in Sydney, Australia, and was senior lecturer in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney where he was also awarded the University Medal (1984) and doctorate (1989). Before becoming an academic, Rowe was a Roman Catholic priest in the Marist Order.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James McAuley</span> Australian poet and academic

James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. He was involved in the Ern Malley poetry hoax.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Douglas Stewart was a major twentieth century Australian poet, as well as short story writer, essayist and literary editor. He published 13 collections of poetry, 5 verse plays, including the well-known Fire on the Snow, many short stories and critical essays, and biographies of Norman Lindsay and Kenneth Slessor. He also edited several poetry anthologies.

David Gordon Brooks is an Australian poet, novelist, short-fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of four published novels, four collections of short stories and five collections of poetry, and his work has won or been shortlisted for major prizes. Brooks is a highly intellectual writer, and his fiction has drawn frequent comparison with the writers Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.

The Grace Leven Prize for Poetry was an annual poetry award in Australia, given in the name of Grace Leven who died in 1922. It was established by William Baylebridge who "made a provision for an annual poetry prize in memory of 'my benefactress Grace Leven' and for the publication of his own work". Grace was his mother's half-sister.

Frederick Thomas Bennett Macartney, poet and critic, was born in Port Melbourne, Australia. His byline was often Frederick T. Macartney.

Greg McLaren is an Australian poet. Born in the New South Wales Hunter Region coalfields town, Kurri Kurri. He moved to Sydney in 1990 where he studied at the University of Sydney and in 2005 he was awarded a PhD in Australian Literature. His thesis was on Buddhist influences on the Australian poets Harold Stewart, Robert Gray and Judith Beveridge. As well as poetry, he has published reviews and criticism. Julieanne Lamond writes in Southerly that "McLaren attempts to find a stable connection between the Buddhist acceptance in the face of unknowing ... and the anger and drama of his sense of history". McLaren's work has been anthologised almost widely. His poems appear in Noel Rowe and Vivian Smith's Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry, Australian Poetry from 1788, A Slow Combusting Hymn and Contemporary Australian Poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeff Guess</span> Australian poet (born 1948)

Jeff Guess is an Australian poet. He has published fifteen poetry collections, written two textbooks on teaching poetry and edited numerous poetry anthologies. He has won many first prizes for his poetry and been awarded five writing grants, and is often on judging panels for major poetry competitions, including the John Bray Award.

This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1952.

Sydney Jephcott (1864-1951) was an Australian poet.

Stephen Kenneth Kelen, known as S. K. Kelen, is an Australian poet and educator. 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.

References

  1. Scrivener, Leone: Vivian Smith, The Companion to Tasmanian History (University of Tasmania).
  2. 1 2 Smith, Vivian, AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, 14 October 2008.
  3. "Fellow: Vivian Smith". Australian Academy of the Humanities. Retrieved 13 March 2022.