After completing his university education at the University of Sacramento, California in 1971, Billy Marshall-Stoneking travelled to Australia to teach at schools in Victoria and the Northern Territory. From 1978 to 1983, he lived and worked at Papunya Aboriginal Settlement (275 kms west of Alice Springs, N.T.) where he collected and published stories and other materials in the local dialect (Pintupi/Luritja) for use in the Papunya outstations' bilingual reading programme. Marshall-Stoneking's long association with the Pintupi people of Central Australia fostered several documentary films, initiating his career in script-writing and film production.
A graduate of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Marshall-Stoneking has written many plays, radio-plays and screenplays, including Lasseter: The Making of a Legend (1985), the ABC TV series Stringer (1988) and was principal script editor on the Australian feature film, Chopper. He has been very active in performance poetry, writing and performing in two major poem-plays, Call It Poetry/Tonight and Out of Limits, staged at the Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf Theatre and the Sydney Opera House. He has also had published several collections of poetry, novels and an 'auto-fictography', Taking America out of the Boy (1993). His poetry has appeared in journals such as Overland, Southerly, Northern Perspective, Phoenix Review, Prism International and in several e-zines including PoetryMagazine.com, Alsop Review, gangway, Empyrios, and Kookamonga Square.
Together with Eric Beach and others, Marshall-Stoneking helped found the Poets' Union of Australia. He has received a number of writing fellowships and has been writer-in-residence at several institutions. He was highly commended in the Jessie Litchfield Prize at the Northern Territory University in 1990. In 2001 he was appointed Head of the MA programme in scriptwriting at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
Australian Poetry Library Author Entry