Ann-Marie Priest Ann-Marie Priest i(A86296 works by)
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Ann-Marie Priest grew up in country South Australia, but has lived most of her adult life in rural Queensland. She gained a Ph.D. in English literature from Macquarie University; with her thesis, her thesis 'The Mystic Self: Mysticism, Subjectivity and the Feminine in Henry James and Virginia Woolf ' (2000). Priest has worked as a Teaching and Learning Advisor at Central Queensland University and has taught part-time in Literary Studies. In 2017, she received the Hazel Rowley Fellowship to work on a biography of Gwen Harwood.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2017 winner Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship For a biography of Australian poet Gwen Harwood.
2015 shortlisted Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship for her research into renowned Australian poet Gwen Harwood.
2010 Australia Council Literature Board Grants Grants for Developing Writers $25,000 for literary non-fiction writing.

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon My Tongue Is My Own : A Life of Gwen Harwood Carlton : Black Inc. , 2022 23813031 2022 single work biography

'A masterful portrait of a major Australian writer, her incandescent poetry and her battles to be heard in a male-dominated literary establishment.

'The first biography of Gwen Harwood (1920-1995), one of Australia's most significant and distinctive poets.

'Harwood is renowned for her brilliance, but loved for her humour, rebellion and mischief. A public figure by the end of her life, she was always deeply protective of her privacy, and even now, some twenty-six years after her death, little is known of the experiences that gave rise to her extraordinary poems. This book follows Harwood from her childhood in 1920s Brisbane to her final years in Hobart in the 1990s. It traces how a lively, sardonic and determined young woman built a career in the conservative 1950s, blasting her way into the patriarchal strongholds of Australian poetry.

'Harwood refused to be bound by convention, 'liberating' herself, to use her word, before women's lib existed. Yet she also struggled for much of her life to combine marriage and motherhood with her creative ambitions. In this sense, she is a twentieth-century everywoman. She is also a unique and powerful presence in Australian literary history, a poet who challenged orthodoxies and spoke in a remarkable range of voices.

'This illuminating, moving biography reveals a deeply passionate figure both at odds with her time and deeply of it, and reclaims and celebrates this important Australian writer.' (Publication summary)

2024 winner ASAL Awards The Australian Historical Association Awards Magarey Medal for Biography
2023 winner National Biography Award
2022 longlisted Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature
y separately published work icon A Free Flame : Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2018 12178428 2018 multi chapter work biography

''I need to be a writer,' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.'

'She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans.

'A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer.

'They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation - their 'need' to be a writer - that would not let them rest.

'Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image.' (Publication summary)

2016 shortlisted Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript
2016 highly commended Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript
'Something Very Difficult and Unusual' : The Love Song of Henry and Olga 2014 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 361 2014; (p. 24-32)
2014 shortlisted The Calibre Prize
Last amended 11 Sep 2018 15:04:00
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