Richard Cooke Richard Cooke i(A119379 works by)
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

Journalist, with a particular focus on American and Australian politics.

Richard Cooke has been the US correspondent and contributing editor for The Monthly: in addition to works indexed on AustLit, he has published a range of additional Monthly essays, surveying American and Australian politics, climate change and the politics of emissions, and Australian sports.

Cooke's work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Best of Longform, Best Australian Essays, The Saturday Paper, The Guardian and Australian Foreign Affairs, among other publications.

'The Crankhandle of History', an article on Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, was shortlisted for the Walkley–Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism in 2018.

In 2019, Cooke released his debut book, Tired of Winning, a chronicle of the decline of the United States under Donald Trump: the book was published by Black Inc.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2023 joint winner Walkley Award — Arts Journalism with Anna Verney, for a series of articles on the John Hughes plagiarism scandal.
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Awards for Works

Being John Hughes 2023 single work essay
— Appears in: The Monthly , March 2023; (p. 34-48) 'BACK IN THE EARLY 1980S, though he was still an undergraduate at the University of Newcastle, John Hughes was already being described as a genius. He was the fi rst person in his family to attend university. His grandparents, Ukrainians displaced by World War Two, were, according to him, the only people in Cessnock who spoke a language other than English. Amid the culture of the coalfi elds and their “mistrust of words”, as Hughes put it later, he grew up reading Tolstoy under the bed covers, and imagined himself writing “words of the same power and beauty”. The teachers who clamoured around him were amazed by his erudition. He seemed predestined to write. It was as if he was preordained to become a writer.' (Introduction)
2023 winner Walkley Award — Print Text Feature Writing Long
The Crankhandle of History : Bruce Chatwin's Song to the Songlines 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: The Monthly , September no. 137 2017; (p. 35-42)

'Epic of Gilgamesh” is Google’s answer to “what is the oldest known literature”. Unknown scribes in the city of Ur picked the poem out in cuneiform letters some 4500 years ago. These clay tablets preserved an older oral tradition, but that part of the story is usually left out. Instead, the Mesopotamian epic fits easily into that cartoonish diagram of the Ascent of Man, where civilisation means writing, a sequence of metals and a procession of capitals: Memphis, Babylon, Athens, Rome.

'Compare this lineage to the ceremonial songs of Aboriginal Australia. Their absolute vintage is unknowable, but the best estimates run to at least 12,000 years old. At this distance in time, the study of literature needs not just linguists but geologists. There are songlines that accurately describe landscape features (like now-disappeared islands) from the end of the Pleistocene epoch. Their provenance may stretch even further back, all the way into the last ice age. They are also alive. The last person to hear Epic of Gilgamesh declaimed in her native culture died millennia ago. Songlines that may have been born 30,000 years ago are being sung right now.'   (Introduction)
2018 shortlisted Walkley Award — Walkley-Pascall Award for Arts Criticism
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Last amended 29 Jan 2020 08:36:26
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