John Kinsella is the author of over seventy books of poetry, fiction, criticism, plays, edited works (such as The Penguin Book of Australian Poetry), and collaborative works. His many awards include the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry (twice) and the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry (three times).
Recent books include Insomnia: poems (Picador 2019; WW Norton, 2020), Cellnight: a verse novel (Transit Lounge, 2023), Argonautica Inlandica: poems (Vagabond, 2023) and The Pastoraclasm: poems (Salt, UK, 2023). Other publications include Beyond Ambiguity: tracing sites of literary activism (Manchester University Press, 2022), Hollow Earth (a novel: Transit Lounge, 2019), Lucida Intervalla (a novel: UWA Publishing, 2018; Dalkey Archive, 2019); Supervivid Depastoralism (poetry: Vagabond, 2021), Pushing Back (stories: Transit Lounge, 2021), Displaced: a rural memoir (Transit Lounge, 2020), and the three volumes of his collected poems, The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022), Harsh Hakea (UWAP, 2023) and Spirals (UWAP, 2024).
A new selected poems, The Darkest Pastoral, will be published by WW Norton in the US and UK in 2025, and his international anthology of animal rights poems, The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin, will also be published in the US and UK in 2025 (Turtle Point Press). The second novel of his ‘Lucida’ trilogy, The Mahler Erasures, will appear in the US with Dalkey Archive late 2024, with the third novel of the trilogy, Fountain of Youth, appearing with the same publisher in the US in 2025.
He is an extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University.
A frequent collaborator with other poets, writers, artist, musicians, and thinkers, he lives on Ballardong Noongar land at ‘Jam Tree Gully’ in the Western Australian wheatbelt. In 2007 he received the Christopher Brennan Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry.
