Pamela Brown Pamela Brown i(A6933 works by) (a.k.a. Pamela Jane Barclay Brown; Pam Brown; Pamela J. B. Brown; Pamela Cocabola Brown)
Also writes as: Pamela Cocabola ; Coca Bola ; 'Eve N. Malley'
Born: Established: 1948 Seymour, Seymour area, Seymour - Kilmore area, Northern Victoria, Victoria, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

The daughter of George Brown, an army warrant officer, and his wife Jeanette, Pam Brown was brought up by a great-aunt from the age of eighteen months until seven, because of her mother's illness. She then rejoined her family and lived on several Queensland army bases, finishing her schooling at Mitchelton High School, where she won a poetry prize in 1965.

Pam Brown became involved in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, and at the age of twenty moved south, where she produced her first volume of poetry, Sureblock (1972). In the mid-1970s she was a bass player with the feminist rock band Clitoris Band. She always continued writing, supporting herself as, among other things, a screenprinter, postal worker, publishing assistant and teacher. In 1981 she moved from Sydney to Adelaide, where she worked at the Experimental Art Foundation, the Come Out youth arts festival and Artists' Week at the Adelaide Festival, 1982. She returned to Sydney in May 1982. She has lectured in film, video and studio research at the College of Fine Art, Sydney, and has worked at the Tin Sheds Art Workshop at Sydney University. In 1988 she produced As Much Trouble as Talking, co-written with Jan McKemmish, for a season at Belvoir St.Theatre and in 1989 she was Playwright-in-Residence at Sydney's Performance Space. She has also written for performance in collaboration with Elizabeth Drake, Carol Christie and Amanda Stewart.

In 1993 Brown was a guest of the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poesie in Paris, France and in 2001 she was a guest at the inaugural Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin in Germany. In 2001 she edited a series of four chapbooks for the independent Sydney publisher, Vagabond Press. She has written reviews and articles for various poetry journals and newspapers and her poetry has been widely published and reviewed in Europe and the United States. She has been poetry editor for Overland, associate editor of Jacket magazine, a contributing editor for the US-based literary annual Fulcrum and a member of the editorial advisory board for HOW2. Brown has given public readings of her work at numerous venues both in Australia and and has been a guest lecturer in various Australian institutions as well as in Hanoi, Vietnam and Potsdam, Germany.

Most Referenced Works

Affiliation Notes

  • Visited or worked in SA for a period

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Stasis Shuffle Melbourne : Hunter Publishers , 2021 20981636 2021 selected work poetry 'In Stasis Shuffle Pam Brown continues to write a poetry that maps the edges of thought, to think ‘what cannot / be thought’. This collection plays with style and turns its attention to both personal friendships and formal experimentation. The poems are fragmentary and discursive, knowing and wry; bursting with jokes, wordplay, strange observation and striking thoughts that unfold with the sudden joy of discovery. This is a significant new collection by one of Australia’s most influential contemporary poets.' (Publication summary)
2023 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
2022 winner Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award
y separately published work icon Click Here For What We Do Sydney : Vagabond Press , 2018 13965575 2018 selected work poetry

'Click here for what we do is a cluster of four loosely connected poems that are not only sceptical of the status quo's serial mendacities and hype but, in a way, they also attempt a coming to terms with the erosion of the idealistic conditions that once made non-mainstream culture, including poetry, so viable and, even, necessary. For Pam Brown writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. She dismantles monumental intent and then, by mixing (rather than layering), splices the remains into a melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric. Hers is a friendly intelligence that clues in connections to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Spurning any lofty design these poems debug the absurdities of contemporary materialism with surreptitious humour. Though disquiet is present it's usually temporary. Here, thinking about the future can be 'trickgensteinian' and yet Pam Brown's poems offer a circumspect optimism.' (Publication summary)

2019 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Poetry
2019 winner ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
2018 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award
y separately published work icon Missing Up Sydney : Vagabond Press , 2015 9242764 2015 selected work poetry (taught in 1 units)

'These offbeat, fragmentary yet often discursive poems were written over three years up to spring 2015. In part, they epitomize the absurdities of contemporary materialism. Pam Brown's well-practised scepticism dismantles monumental intent and splices the remains into a shrewd melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric complemented by playfulness. For Pam writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. You know - the fridge over there, the bus stop, surf music on a radio, a raisin squashed against a floor tile - always backgrounding a connection to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Though disquiet is present it is usually temporary - an optimistic wit plays through this idiosyncratic poetry as a kind of placebo. But, in the end, Pam Brown simply lets the language do the work.' (Publication summary)

2018 winner Festival Awards for Literature (SA) Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature South Australian Literary Awards John Bray Award for Poetry
Last amended 19 Jun 2014 15:28:10
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