KEVIN BROPHY
KEVIN BROPHY
is a 2021 recipient of the Order of Australia (AM) 'For significant service to tertiary education, and to creative writing'. He is the author of
nineteen books of poetry, fiction and essays. His latest book, Look at the Lake (Puncher & Wattmann)
received the 2019 Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry. Other recent books include Misericordia (Salt Wattle Press, 2016 - a chapbook),
This is What Gives Us Time
(Gloria SMH Press, 2016 http://gloriasmh.com/) Walking: New and Selected Poems (John Leonard Press
2013 http://johnleonardpress.com/). He teaches poetry and the art of the personal essay in the Creative writing program in the School of Culture
and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His poems, fiction and essays have been anthologised in Best Australian Poems 2004,
2006, 2007, 2011, Best Australian Essays 2009 and Best Australian Stories 2012 (Black Inc.), Australian Poetry since 1788
(UNSW Press 2011), Best Australian Essays: a ten-year collection (Black Inc. 2011), the MacQuarie PEN Anthology of Australian
Literature (Allen & Unwin 2009), Australian Verse since 1788 (UNSW Press 2011), Australian Love Poems (Inkerman
& Blunt 2013) and other publications. In 2009 he was awarded the Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay. He has been a recent board
member of Going Down Swinging (2009-12), four times a judge for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and through Hit & Miss,
the publisher of chapbooks by Melbourne poets. From 2001-2008 he was also a member of the Executive of the Australasian Association of
Writing Programs. He has performed and read widely in Melbourne and regional Victoria.
In June 2021, Brophy's poetry was acknowledged with a Member of the Order of Australia award, as Mark Phillips notes
in an issue of Brunswick Voice
(25th June 2021) :
Kevin Brophy is the closest thing Brunswick has to its own poet laureate. A lifelong resident of the
inner northern suburbs and a key figure in Australia’s literary scene for more than four decades, Brophy has regularly drawn
on his local environment for inspiration.
In August 2012, Walleah Press published 'RADAR', jointly written by Kevin Brophy and Nathan Curnow.
It is truly a double. My poems are (seemingly) conscious, direct confessions and yours are unconscious waking dreams.
- Nathan Curnow
This world always senses another world. Maybe your poems rescue mine while mine throw a life line to yours.
- Kevin Brophy
OTHER WORK BY KEVIN BROPHY
Poetry
A Less Personal Life
Happiness and the Times in Between
From Moments, Years
Ocean/Fishing
The Illustrated Church
Launch speeches
Nathan Curnow's The Ghost Project
Stuart Forsyth's Personal Taxidermy
Reviews
Lionel Abrahams' Chaos theory of the heart and other poems
Anne Kellas' Isolated States
[External site]
Kevin Brophy's review of 'Victorian women poets of WW1' (edited by Michael Sharkey) : Capturing the reverberations of loss