Jordie Albiston Jordie Albiston i(A26340 works by) (a.k.a. Jordi Albiston)
Born: Established: 1961 Melbourne, Victoria, ; Died: Ceased: 1 Mar 2022
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Jordie Albiston was an award-winning Melbourne-based poet. She studied flute at the Victorian College of the Arts and published her first collection of poetry in 1995. Albiston graduated with a PhD in literature from La Trobe University.

Albiston had a particular interest in 'documentary poetry', and her book Botany Bay Document: A Poetic History of The Women of Botany Bay is based heavily on historical sources such as shipping logs, newspaper excerpts, etchings, and letters, while The Hanging of Jean Lee is based on historical research about the last woman hanged in Australia. Both of these works were adapted for musical theatre by composer Andrée Greenwell. The Hanging of Jean Lee was staged at the Sydney Opera House Studio in 2006.

Her poetry collections include Nervous Arcs (1995), Botany Bay Document (1996), The Hanging of Jean Lee (1998), My Secret Life and Other Poems (2002), The Fall (2003), Vertigo (a Cantata), (2007), The Sonnet According to ‘M’ (2009), XII Poems (2013), The Book of Ethel (2013), Jack & Molly (& Her) (2016), Euclid’s Dog (2017), Cyprus Poems (2018), Warlines (2018), Element (2020), and Fifteeners (2021).

In 2019, she won the Patrick White Award for her body of work: her individual collections were frequently shortlisted for or won significant Australian poetry prizes, including the Mary Gilmore Award.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2021 finalist Melbourne Prize Melbourne Prize for Literature
2019 winner Patrick White Award
2019 recipient Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships Literature Arts Projects For Individuals and Groups $45,600

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Frank Canberra : National Library of Australia , 2023 25539602 2023 selected work poetry

'In Frank, Jordie Albiston has combined daily snapshots from Australian photographic pioneer Frank Hurley's Antarctic diaries into a moving poetry collage. This volume, comprising about 120 poems, offers a portrait of Hurley as photographer and as man, at the end of the heroic era of exploration. Albiston explores the idea that historical narratives can yield a strange and unexpected power when subjected to the pressures of poetic form, and in this way she brings Hurley's thoughts and actions to life in a manner never seen before.

'Frank Hurley accompanied both Mawson and Shackleton on their celebrated expeditions to Antarctica in the early twentieth century. Hurley's polar diaries, held at the National Library of Australia, represent a written adjunct to his pictorial surveys of what was then a geographical, cultural and artistic unknown.

'Frank is a beautiful, evocative and highly accessible volume that will delight both poetry readers and those interested in Antarctica and Hurley. The poems were written and compiled during the author's tenure as the National Library of Australia's 2021 Creative Arts Fellow in Australian Writing. Jordie Albiston sadly passed away during the production of Frank; NLA Publishing is proud to now be realising her vision.'

2024 shortlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
y separately published work icon Fifteeners Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2021 22021470 2021 selected work poetry

'The sonnet is a classic lyric form that has beguiled and perplexed poets for over seven hundred years. In this, her thirteenth collection, Jordie Albiston re-invents the sonnet structure, trading meter for syllabics, and employing fifteen lines in lieu of the traditional fourteen. Themes of destruction and loss, hope and wonder, and the pressing fate of an unstable world, are coded like enduring questions into the machinery of these extraordinary poems.

'Albiston's relationship with the sonnet has prevailed since her earliest work, most notably the highly celebrated and award-winning the sonnet according to 'm'.'

Source : publisher's blurb

2022 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Poetry
2022 winner Festival Awards for Literature (SA) Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature South Australian Literary Awards John Bray Award for Poetry
y separately published work icon Element : The Atomic Weight and Radius of Love Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2020 18367147 2020 selected work poetry

'Using chemistry as an indexing trope, Jordie Albiston tabulates the human predicament of love: its foundations and fundamentals; its configuration of emotions; its recurring properties; and its inherent assumption of many as yet unknown elements to occur.  These poems range across space and time, all the while adhering to the formal constraints of atomic theory.  The states and structures of being are scrutinised according to love's capacity for passion and fissure, blessing and debt, and a compound body of two is progressively mapped onto the page.

'This remarkable collection sees Albiston's longstanding conversation with mathematics and poetic form advance into the realm of science.  With characteristic invention, orchestration and play, she discovers and describes the universal vastness and everyday physics of love.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2021 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
2020 shortlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
Last amended 4 Mar 2022 09:52:46
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