John Tranter
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John Tranter (born 1943) is an Australian poet, publisher and editor. Currently he is the publisher and editor of the internet quarterly literary magazine Jacket.
Tranter was born in Cooma, New South Wales and attended country schools, then took his BA in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He has worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, making more than twenty reading tours to venues in the USA, Britain and Europe since the mid-1980s. He has lived in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia, and overseas in London, Cambridge, Singapore, Florida, and San Francisco. He now lives in Sydney, where he is a company director (with his wife Lyn) of Australian Literary Management, Australia’s premier literary agency. He is married, with two adult children, and is presently completing a doctoral programme at the University of Wollongong.
In 1975 he co-designed the first Books & Writing radio program for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a program format which was still going strong twenty years later. During 1987 and 1988 John Tranter was in charge of the ABC Radio National weekly two-hour arts program Radio Helicon, and from 1990 to 1993 he was the poetry editor of the Sydney-based business/ arts weekly The Bulletin.
He has received many fellowships and other grants, and has been a visiting scholar at various institutions, from Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University to writer-in-residence at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida and at Cambridge University in England. He has published twenty volumes of poetry, including a Selected Poems (Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982).
John Tranter’s Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected, published by the University of Queensland Press, won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for poetry in 2006, his ’Under Berlin, published by the University of Queensland Press, won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (the New South Wales State Literary Award for Poetry) in 1989, and At The Florida won the Melbourne Age ‘Book of the Year’ award for poetry in 1993. Other recent books are The Floor of Heaven (Harper Collins, 1992), a book-length sequence of four verse narratives, the poetry collections Late Night Radio (Polygon, Edinburgh, UK, 1998), Heart Print (Salt, Cambridge, UK, 2001), Different Hands (Folio/ Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Cambridge and Western Australia, 1998), a collection of seven experimental computer-assisted prose pieces, Borrowed Voices (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2002), a dozen reinterpretations of poems by other poets, Studio Moon and Trio (both Salt Publications, UK, 2003).
He compiled and edited The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry with Philip Mead in 1991. Earlier anthologies include the controversial The New Australian Poetry (Makar, Brisbane, 1979), and a selection of ninety-four poems from the Australian bicentennial poetry competition in 1988, published by ABC Books as The Tin Wash Dish.
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tranter, John |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Contemporary Australian poet and editor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1943 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Cooma, New South Wales, Australia |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
