John Hawke John Hawke i(A13690 works by)
Born: Established: 1965 ;
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

John Hawke has a PhD in English from the University of Sydney, where his thesis was awarded the Dame Leonie Kramer Prize in 1999. From 1997-2006, he taught literary theory within the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong. He has been a Senior Lecturer, specializing in poetry, in the Department of English at Monash.

He is a widely published poet, who has received a number of grants and prizes, including the 1994 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship.

John has been involved in editing literary publications since 1981, and in recent years was an Assistant Editor for Heat magazine and a contributing editor to Southerly and Boxkite. As coordinator and judge of the Newcastle Poetry Prize he has edited two anthologies of Australian poetry, The New World Tattoo (1996) and The Nightjar (1997).

His critical study, Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement, is published by University of Wollongong Press. A collection of his poetry was published by Cordite in 2015. He was co-convenor of the Poetry and the Trace international conference held at the State Library of Victoria in July 2008.

In October 2017, he was announced as the Australian Book Review's new poetry editor.

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Aurelia Carlton : Cordite Press , 2015 8623953 2015 selected work poetry

'In his retelling of the myth of Orpheus – where Eurydice is described as ‘the profoundly obscure point to which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend’ – Maurice Blanchot charts the relationship between poetry and loss, by which to desire is to necessitate, even to invoke, obscurity: to confine the object of desire, along with the poet, to song; to translate life into word, and, through word, into dream. In this conception, to write is always to admit to, but also to dwell with, loss – to experience the loss of a once-loved person as a mode of living. When Nerval writes that dreams are a second life, he not only refers to the dreams we experience in sleep, but also to the dreams that arise as a consequence of lost desires, dreams perhaps thwarted by chance: of lives once meant, but never lived.

'These lives often coexist with our own as lost alternatives, counter-experiences or impossible possibilities; they lie within the everyday like a subtext, or a haunting. To transmute desire into language is to erect a monument to that desire, to announce it as permanent, but also to profoundly transform both the subject and the object of desire: to confine them, in their relationship, to the monument and the tomb. Since evocation presupposes loss or absence – as Mallarmé showed – then to write is to desire something that continually slips away, and must once again be invoked in a series of repetitions and beginnings that both conjure and obscure. '–John Hawke' (Publication summary)

2015 winner Anne Elder Award
Last amended 11 Apr 2018 16:56:15
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