person or book cover
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Angela Gardner Angela Gardner i(A59869 works by)
Born: Established: 1957 Cardiff,
c
Wales (UK),
c
c
United Kingdom (UK),
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Western Europe, Europe,
;
Gender: Female
Arrived in Australia: 1988
Heritage: Welsh ; Cornish
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BiographyHistory

Angela Gardner lived in Melbourne as a child, when her father worked for the Mission to Seaman. After studying art at the Cardiff College of Art, and living in London for a decade, she migrated to Australia in 1988. She has lived in Sydney, Brisbane, and the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast. She received a Master of Arts in Visual Arts from Griffith University's Queensland College of Art in 2002. Gardner is a visual artist and poet and founding editor of the poetry journal foam:e. She is a principal of the small fine press light-trap press and occasionally blogs at: http://light-trap.blogspot.com/ 

Among a number of residencies, awards, and prizes, Gardner has received a Churchill Fellowship (2007) to investigate collaborations between poets and visual artists in the US and the UK. In 2008 she was awarded a Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS) grant, an initiative of the State and Federal governments, administered by Arts Queensland, to create two limited edition artists books. Working with Brisbane-based printmakers, Gwenn Tasker and Lisa Pullen, etchings and lino-cut prints were produced that respond to her poetry series, 'The Twelve Labours' and 'The Night Ladder'. These works were published in limited edition fine press books. Her artist books have been finalists in The Libris Awards in 2010, 2018 and 2022. She was awarded a residency to Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium) in 2020 to work on a printmaking project "Orbis Imago, system and chance" resulting in a solo exhibition at the Brisbane Institute of Art 2021 and a print from the series The Weight of Clouds was Highly Commended in the Milburn National Landscape Art Prize 2021. Some images of her artworks can be seen at the Jacket 2 website, 2012. A folio of prints including letterpress, The Sorry Tale, is in the collection of The State Library of New South Wales other visual work is in the collection of The Victoria & Albert Museum and The National Library of Wales amongst other public collections.

In 2008, Gardner won an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland, which she undertook in mid 2009. While in Ireland, Gardner met G C Waldrep, a renowned American poet, and Cherry Smyth a highly awarded London-based Irish poet. Both poets have become important colleagues and early readers for many of her poems. In 2018 she was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Literature grant and in 2019 a Published Author residency at the Katherine Suzanna Pritchard Centre in Western Australia.

Gardner's poetry has been well reviewed and she has read at the Queensland Poetry Festival a number of times and has acted as a judge for the inaugural Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Award (2015), The Val Vallis Award (2018) and The State Library of Queensland Poetry Collection (2018, 2019). She has been included in Best Australian Poems 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2017 and numerous anthologies including Out of the Box, Puncher & Wattman 2009; Notes for the Translators ASM 2012; Australian Love Poetry Inkerman & Blunt 2013; Writing to the Wire UWA Press 2016; To End All Wars Puncher & Wattman 2018; The Edge of Necessary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966-2016, Aquifer Books; Ashbery Mode, Tinfish 2019; Gothic Poems, Emma Press, 2019 and The Australian Prose Poetry Anthology, MUP, 2020. She was co-editor with Leah Muddle of Rabbit Poetry Journal, ART issue 2022.

In 2017, the judges of the 2018 Dorothy Hewett Award described her manuscript Some Sketchy Notes on Matter as 'With a hovering intelligence and a laudable lack of ego, the beautifully controlled poems of ‘Some Sketchy Notes on Matter’ investigate the world with an ecstatic’s eye.' (Press release). This was subsequently published by Recent work Press 2020. Another manuscript, an early draft of The Sorry tale of the Mignonette was also shortlisted in 2020. This book was subsequently published by Shearsman Books, UK in 2021. The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette was a National Poetry Day selection UK 2021, a Poetry Book Society recommendation UK 2021 and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2022. The Telegraph (London) in July 2021 described The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette as one of "The Best Poetry Books of 2021 so far', describing the poem My Mignonette within the collection "turns into a gorgeous, almost incomprehensible tumult. Punctuation and grammar come unmoored in a Gerard Manley Hopkins-ish ecstasy that feels at once Victorian and avant-garde". 

In 2019, Gardner was ACT Writer-in-Residence, a joint initiative of the ACT Writers Centre and UNSW Canberra, with further funding support from Copyright Agency. While there she lectured at UNSW Canberra and the University of Canberra and was visiting artist at ANU School of Art. Also in 2019 she had poems shortlisted in the Aesthetica International Creative Writing Prize and longlisted in the Live Canon International Poetry Prize. In 202 a poem was highly commended in The Forward Prize and included in the The Forward Book of Poetry 2022. Recent readings have included Poetry on the Move, Canberra; Fingal Poetry Festival, Dublin, Ireland and StAnza Poetry festival St Andrews, Scotland.  

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2023 shortlisted Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest for 'Slippage'.
2020 recipient The Regional Arts Fund laboratory of ideas - Printmaking at Frans Masereel Centre Belgium. 'The Weight of Clouds', produced during this residency, was highly commended in the 2021 Milburn National Landscape Art Prize.
2019 recipient ACT Writer-in-Residence

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette Swindon : Shearsman Books , 2021 21411601 2021 single work novel

'The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette tells the tale of the author's great-grandmother's cousin, Richard Parker, a cabin-boy on a yacht being sailed from Southampton to Sydney in 1884 for Jack Want a prominent New South Wales barrister and politician. The Mignonette foundered in the South Atlantic far from land, and after nineteen days with no sight of any other vessel to rescue them, and with all four in a terrible state, the captain and mate decided to murder and eat poor Richard. Days later the remaining sailors were rescued and returned to Falmouth to face justice. The original trial at Exeter Assize was moved to The Old Bailey due to huge public interest and the need to clarify the Empire’s maritime legal framework regarding what had been common practice.

'The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette takes place in the West Country, at sea and in Australia. It explores power relationships, individual motives, survivor guilt and self-justification, and justice and divine retribution. Poetry heightens the tension and drives the narrative telling the personal and human story of one of the most important legal judgements in English Law—that necessity is not a defence for murder—and is still taught at universities the world over.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2022 shortlisted Wales Book of the Year English@Bangor Uni Poetry Award
2020 shortlisted Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript
y separately published work icon Some Sketchy Notes on Matter Kambah : Recent Work Press , 2020 19134730 2020 selected work poetry

'What does it take to hold the sky in place?
The moving raft of sky a dark shadow of itself.
The miracle of it. All of us holding strings.

'From the Afterword:

'‘Some Sketchy Notes on Matter came together slowly around preoccupations of safety and shelter at an individual, societal and global level. I also wanted to look at the tensions between digital and analogue reality, between the city and a natural world that exists without us, strange, compelling and precarious. At its worst these tensions become an imbalance, a violence, threatening not only the individual body but the entire planet.’' (Publication summary)

2018 shortlisted Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript
Upgrade to Everything i "Between housework and billable hours your endless needs.", 2019 single work poetry
— Appears in: Plumwood Mountain : An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics , August vol. 6 no. 2 2019; Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2020 2020;
2019 shortlisted Aesthetica Creative Writing Competition
2019 shortlisted Aesthetica Creative Writing Award
Last amended 22 Dec 2022 01:08:38
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