fierce uncompromising . . . a powerful talent hammering away
-- Weekend Australia

John Mateer is a South African-born poet and art-critic currently living in Australia, where he is a tutor in the University of Melbourne’s Department of English. He was the 2001 winner of the C J Dennis Prize for poetry at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, one of Australia’s leading literary accolades. In 2003 he was a recipient of the Centenary Medal for services to Australian literature and society.

He has been invited to read his poetry at the 62nd World Congress of PEN, at Poetry Africa 2001, and at many Australian writers festivals. He has been writer-in-residence at the Australia Centre Medan in Sumatra, Indonesia, at the School of Contemporary Art (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts) in Perth, Australia, and in 2002-3 was Asialink’s writer-in-residence in Kyoto, Japan.

John has published four collections of poems in Australia, and several chapbooks in Australia, South Africa, Indonesia and most recently Japan: among them Burning Swans (1994), Anachronism (1997), Barefoot Speech (2000), Loanwords (2002) and The Ancient Capital of Images, a bilingual collection in English and Japanese. His work has been included in the anthologies Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets and The New Century of South African Verse. His first work of prose, Semar’s Cave: an Indonesian Journal, will be published in 2004.

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