Tracy Ryan (writer)

Last updated

Tracy Ryan (born 1964) is an Australian poet and novelist. She has also worked as an editor, publisher, translator, and academic.

Contents

Life

Tracy Ryan was born in Western Australia, where she grew up as part of a large family. [1] She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from Curtin University and studied European languages at the University of Western Australia; her PhD (2013) was also from that university. [2]

She has lived in Cambridge, England, where she worked as a bookseller, tutor, editor, and writer. She was Judith E. Wilson Junior Visiting Fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge in 1998. She taught Australian Literature and Film at the University of East Anglia. She has also lived in Ohio in the USA.

She is married to poet John Kinsella and has two children.

Literary career

Tracy Ryan has published over fifteen books, including five novels. [3] Her poetry has appeared in several magazines, such as Salt, Literary Review, and Cordite. She has also appeared in anthologies. Ryan is particularly interested in languages and has translated several French writers including Hélène Cixous, Maryline Desbiolles, and Francoise Han.

In the 1990s, Ryan, with John Kinsella, developed Folio(Salt), an offshoot of Salt Magazine. It publishes and co-publishes "books and chapbooks focused on a pluralist vision of contemporary poetry which extended across national boundaries and a wide range of poetic practices". [4]

Reviewer Tim Allen, reviewing the anthology Foil, wrote of her poetry as follows: "Tracy Ryan’s poems are tightly packed vibrations of spiky conceits. They have a restless intelligence which seems to suspect everything they touch; the references are scholarly and the contention is feminist but the result is polychromatic." [5]

The John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize was established in 2005 and is open to members of the University of Cambridge. The award is for an original verse composition in any form, of 500 lines or less. [6]

She currently has a two-year grant from the Australia Council.

Themes and inspiration

Ryan's poetry has been compared, by poet Dorothy Hewett, with Sylvia Plath, and Debra Zott, in her review of Hothouse, agrees, saying that "certainly, there are [in Ryan's poetry] the mythic underpinnings one finds in Plath's poetry, as well as that quality of imbuing the personal with highly dramatised mythic proportions" and that "it is no secret that Ryan has been influenced by Plath". However, she argues that "the very mention of Plath's name shapes, and threatens to place limits on, the reader's experience of Ryan's poetry", that "Tracy Ryan's poetry does not need the Plath myth to prop it up". [7]

In 2001, Ryan said the following about her writing:

I don’t adhere to any particular school of thought, except in the broadest sense that my writing is inextricably bound up with my feminism. This would be the only real connector between my books. I am interested in trying to find ways in which language may be interrupted, disrupted and rejigged for feminist purposes (among others). Usually this attempt would arise from something in either my personal life or the world around me. My home state is currently enacting a legal clamp-down on women, with regard to street prostitution—passing laws that restrict women’s movements and rights to occupy space. Though such factors are often what ‘provokes’ me into a poem, the poem equally draws life off other books (like most poets, I spend a lot of time reading). I work by a kind of principle of immersion in particular poets at particular times. [8]

Awards and nominations

Works

Poetry

Novels

Edited

Plays

Related Research Articles

John Kinsella is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. His writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an 'international regionalism' in his approach to place. He has also frequently worked in collaboration with other writers, artists and musicians.

Frieda Rebecca Hughes is an English-Australian poet and painter. She has published seven children's books, four poetry collections and one short story and has had many exhibitions. Hughes is the daughter of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Her mother was an American novelist and poet, and her father was the British poet laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Scott</span> Indigenous Australian novelist

Kim Scott is an Australian novelist of Aboriginal Australian ancestry. He is a descendant of the Noongar people of Western Australia.

David McCooey, poet, critic, musician, and academic. He is Personal Chair in Literary Studies and Professional & Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong.

The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is awarded annually as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for a book of collected poems or for a single poem of substantial length published in book form. It is named after Kenneth Slessor (1901–1971).

Jaya Savige is an Australian poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jordie Albiston</span> Australian poet and academic (1961–2022)

Jordie Albiston was an Australian poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Salom</span> Australian poet and novelist

Philip Salom is an Australian poet and novelist, whose poetry books have drawn widespread acclaim. His 14 collections of poetry and six novels are noted for their originality and expansiveness and surprising differences from title to title. His poetry has won awards in Australia and the UK. His novel Waiting was shortlisted for Australia's prestigious 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the 2017 Prime Minister's Literary Awards and the 2016 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. His well-reviewed novel The Returns (2019) was a finalist in the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he published The Fifth Season. Since then, he has published Sweeney and the Bicycles (2022).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bronwyn Lea</span> Australian poet, academic and editor

Bronwyn Lea is a contemporary Australian poet, academic and editor.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Aitken</span> Australian poet

Adam Aitken is an Australian poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcella Polain</span> Australian poet and writer

Marcella Polain is an Australian-resident poet, novelist and short fiction writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Holland-Batt</span> Australian poet and academic

Sarah Holland-Batt is a contemporary Australian poet, critic, and academic.

The Judith Wright Award, also known as the Judith Wright Prize, was awarded annually as part of the ACT Poetry Award between 2005 and 2011 for a book of poems published the previous year in book form by an Australian author. It was awarded for a published collection by an Australian poet.

Anthony Lawrence is a contemporary Australian poet and novelist. Lawrence has received a number of Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board Grants, including a Fellowship, and has won many awards for his poetry, including the inaugural Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize, and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His most recent collection is Headwaters which was awarded the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry in 2017.

Felicity Plunkett is an Australian poet, literary critic, editor and academic.

Maria Takolander, born in Melbourne in 1973, is an Australian writer of Finnish heritage.

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.

Lisa Gorton is an Australian poet, novelist, literary editor and essayist. She is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Press Release, Hotel Hyperion, and Empirical. Her novel The Life of Houses, received the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction, and the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction (shared). Gorton is also the editor of Black Inc's anthology Best Australian Poems 2013.

Charmaine Papertalk Green is an Indigenous Australian poet. As Charmaine Green she works as a visual and installation artist.

References

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.