Wild Surmise

Wild Surmise
Author	Dorothy Porter
Country	Australia
Language	English
Publisher	Picador, Australia
Publication date	2002
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	293
ISBN	0330363808
Preceded by	What a Piece of Work
Followed by	El Dorado

Last updated April 29, 2019

Wild Surmise is a 2002 verse novel by Australian poet Dorothy Porter which was shortlisted for the 2003 Miles Franklin Award.

A verse novel is a type of narrative poetry in which a novel-length narrative is told through the medium of poetry rather than prose. Either simple or complex stanzaic verse-forms may be used, but there will usually be a large cast, multiple voices, dialogue, narration, description, and action in a novelistic manner.

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country by total area. The neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north; the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east; and New Zealand to the south-east. The population of 25 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, and its largest city is Sydney. The country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.

Dorothy Featherstone Porter was an Australian poet. She was a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award.

Notes

Dedication: For Andy
Epigraph: 'There felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific - and all his men loo'd at each other with a wild surmise -' - 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.' John Keats
Epigraph: 'Behold now, standing before you, the man who has pierced the air and penetrated the sky, wended his way amongst the stars and overpassed the margins of the world. - 'La Cena de le Ceneri.' Giordano Bruni (1548-1600).

Adaptation

This novel was adapted for the stage by Jane Montgomery Griffiths and directed by Marion Potts. Performances of the play were held at the Malthouse Theatre, in Melbourne, in November and December 2012.^[1]

Marion Potts is an Australian theatre director.

Malthouse Theatre is the resident theatre company of The Coopers Malthouse building in Southbank, part of the Melbourne Arts Precinct. In the 1980s it was known as the Playbox Theatre Company and was housed in the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne.

Reviews

The Sydney Morning Herald^[2]

Awards and nominations

2003 shortlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award
2004 winner Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (SA) — John Bray Award for Poetry
2004 winner Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (SA) — Premier's Award for the Best Overall Published Work

The Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature were established in 1986 and are an initiative of the Government of South Australia, managed through Arts SA. They are granted biennially to the best authors in Australian children’s literature, fiction, innovation, non-fiction and poetry. The awards, which judge the best works published in Australia in the previous two years, are the nation’s most competitive literary awards .

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References

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[1] "Wild Surmise" by Andrew Fuhrmann, "The Australian Book Review"

[2] "Wild Surmise" by David McCooey, The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 2002