'A masterful portrait of a major Australian writer, her incandescent poetry and her battles to be heard in a male-dominated literary establishment.
'The first biography of Gwen Harwood (1920-1995), one of Australia's most significant and distinctive poets.
'Harwood is renowned for her brilliance, but loved for her humour, rebellion and mischief. A public figure by the end of her life, she was always deeply protective of her privacy, and even now, some twenty-six years after her death, little is known of the experiences that gave rise to her extraordinary poems. This book follows Harwood from her childhood in 1920s Brisbane to her final years in Hobart in the 1990s. It traces how a lively, sardonic and determined young woman built a career in the conservative 1950s, blasting her way into the patriarchal strongholds of Australian poetry.
'Harwood refused to be bound by convention, 'liberating' herself, to use her word, before women's lib existed. Yet she also struggled for much of her life to combine marriage and motherhood with her creative ambitions. In this sense, she is a twentieth-century everywoman. She is also a unique and powerful presence in Australian literary history, a poet who challenged orthodoxies and spoke in a remarkable range of voices.
'This illuminating, moving biography reveals a deeply passionate figure both at odds with her time and deeply of it, and reclaims and celebrates this important Australian writer.' (Publication summary)
'Gwen Harwood is one of Australia’s finest poets. Her poetry is studied in secondary schools across the nation. While she remains largely unknown internationally, her poetry and letters continue to excite and inspire readers 27 years after her death.'
John Harwood on Gwen Harwood and the Perils of Reticence
Peter Rose
(presenter),
2022
24765554
2022
single work
podcast
'Ann-Marie Priest’s My Tongue Is My Own, published by La Trobe University Press and reviewed in our June issue, is the first authorised biography of the Australian poet Gwen Harwood (1920–1995). Unsurprisingly, this was not the first attempt to record the life of one of Australia’s most loved and admired poets. In an exclusive feature for ABR, John Harwood reflects on the conflicting motives behind his literary executorship of his mother’s estate – an estate holding the secrets to an at-times fractious marriage between two opposing temperaments.
'It’s a candid, fascinating addition to the vast literature surrounding Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame (1992) and the knotty ethics of literary biography.
'John Harwood has written poetry, fiction, biography, environmental journalism, literary criticism, and satire. His novels The Ghost Writer (2004), The Séance (2008), and The Asylum (2012) have been translated into several languages and won several awards.
'This commentary is generously supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.' (Production summary)
'Gwen Harwood is one of Australia’s most important poets, renowned for her lyrical brilliance and wit. Her Collected Poems, published in 2003, earned her praise as one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. She also appears in Roelf Bolt’s Encyclopedia of Liars and Deceivers as ‘Gwen Harwood, Housewife and Poetess’.' (Introduction)
'The Red Queen’s impossible rule offers a striking allegory of the biographer’s dilemma. While your subject is still alive, it seems reasonable to get to know them and build a relationship of trust with them. In this way you might be better able to understand their private and intimate worlds. If your subject is a writer, you might become more confident in your ability to weave closer correspondences between their life and work. But if you then become privy to their secrets, and perhaps even come to love them as a dear friend, it becomes almost impossible to write about them dispassionately: to ‘cut’ them with your knife and fork.' (Introduction)
'Gwen Harwood is one of Australia’s most important poets, renowned for her lyrical brilliance and wit. Her Collected Poems, published in 2003, earned her praise as one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. She also appears in Roelf Bolt’s Encyclopedia of Liars and Deceivers as ‘Gwen Harwood, Housewife and Poetess’.' (Introduction)
'Gwen Harwood is one of Australia’s finest poets. Her poetry is studied in secondary schools across the nation. While she remains largely unknown internationally, her poetry and letters continue to excite and inspire readers 27 years after her death.'
'When Ann-Marie Priest wrote to me in 2015 asking whether she might talk to me about her proposed biography of my mother, and requesting my permission to examine some correspondence in the Fryer Library, which I, as Gwen Harwood’s literary executor, had placed on restricted access, I replied with a terse refusal to cooperate. Since my mother’s death in December 1995, I had kept tight control of her vast correspondence, nearly all of which she had donated to various research libraries over the last two decades of her life, and I saw no reason to change my ways.' (Introduction)
John Harwood on Gwen Harwood and the Perils of Reticence
Peter Rose
(presenter),
2022
24765554
2022
single work
podcast
'Ann-Marie Priest’s My Tongue Is My Own, published by La Trobe University Press and reviewed in our June issue, is the first authorised biography of the Australian poet Gwen Harwood (1920–1995). Unsurprisingly, this was not the first attempt to record the life of one of Australia’s most loved and admired poets. In an exclusive feature for ABR, John Harwood reflects on the conflicting motives behind his literary executorship of his mother’s estate – an estate holding the secrets to an at-times fractious marriage between two opposing temperaments.
'It’s a candid, fascinating addition to the vast literature surrounding Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame (1992) and the knotty ethics of literary biography.
'John Harwood has written poetry, fiction, biography, environmental journalism, literary criticism, and satire. His novels The Ghost Writer (2004), The Séance (2008), and The Asylum (2012) have been translated into several languages and won several awards.
'This commentary is generously supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.' (Production summary)
