John Kinsella (poet)

John Kinsella
Born1963 (age 62–63)
Perth, Western Australia
OccupationsPoet, novelist, critic, essayist, and editor.
Writing career
Notable awards2012 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, co-winner; 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Awards — Poetry, winner

John Vincent Kinsella is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, essayist, and editor. Mainly known for his poetry, his writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an "international regionalism" in his approach to place. He has also frequently worked in collaboration with other writers, artists, and musicians. He has also written under the names John Heywood and Ern Malley. Kinsella was a founding editor of the literary journal Salt: An International Journal of Poetry and Poetics in 1990.

Early life and education

John Vincent Kinsella was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1963.[1] His mother was a poet and he began writing poetry as a child.

He worked in a variety of places, including laboratories, a fertiliser factory, and on farms, before becoming a full-time writer.[2]

Career

Overview

Kinsella has published between 40 and 70 books ("depending on how you count them"), and is one of Australia's most prolific contemporary poets.[3][4] He has published some work under the pseudonyms "John Heywood" and "Ern Malley" (the latter referring to the Ern Malley literary hoax).[1] His writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an "international regionalism" in his approach to place.[5] He has said that all of his work is placed on a patch of land in the Western Australian wheatbelt.[3] Author David Brooks, wrote in 2022: "If his poetry can be seen and understood as project (as I think it can: I think this is its real achievement), evolving into what he might describe as an ecopoetics, then these wheatbelt meditations are its core. They are an attempt to adjust the mindset and language of more traditional poetry to the needs of the ravaged landscape and the environmental crisis in which we find ourselves".[3]

His awards include three Western Australian Premier's Book Awards,[6] the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the 2008 Christopher Brennan Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry,[7] the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for poetry (twice)[8] and the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry.[9]

Poetry and novels

Kinsella published his first collections of poems in the 1980s: The Frozen Sea (1983), under the name John Heywood, and, in 1989, The Book of Two Faces: Poems and The Night Parrots.[10][3]

His poems have appeared in journals such as Stand, The Times Literary Supplement, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The New Yorker,[11] the London Review of Books[12] and Antipodes. His poetry collections include: Poems 1980-1994, The Silo, The Undertow: New & Selected Poems, Visitants (1999), Wheatlands (with Dorothy Hewett, 2000) and The Hierarchy of Sheep (2001).[13] His book, Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems, includes an introduction by Harold Bloom and his poetry collection, The New Arcadia, was published in June 2005. Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems appeared in 2016, and Insomnia in 2019. After these came the first two volumes of his collected poems: The Ascension of Sheep (2021) and Harsh Hakea (2022).[13]

Kinsella has published various books of autobiographical writing including Auto (2001) and Displaced: A Rural Life (2020).[14] He has also written plays, short stories and the novels Genre and Post-colonial.[13]

Kinsella's 2010 book, Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley, was published by Liverpool University Press and was edited by Niall Lucy.[1]

Editor and critic

Kinsella was a founding editor of the literary journal Salt: An International Journal of Poetry and Poetics in 1990, which was published until around 2003, and became the foundation of Salt Publishing in 1999.[15][16]

He was international editor of The Kenyon Review, an American journal.[17] He co-edited a special issue on Australian poetry for the American journal Poetry and various other issues of international journals. He was a poetry critic for The Observer and is an editorial consultant for Westerly.[18]

He was Cambridge correspondent for the Australian literary magazine Overland, and co-editor of the British literary journal Stand.[17]

He edited the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), and co-edited, with Tracy Ryan, Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (2017).[13]

His critical works include the poetics of place trilogy, Disclosed Poetics: beyond landscape and lyricism (2007), Polysituatedness (2017)[19] and Beyond Ambiguity (2021). In these he posits his theory of "international regionalism" and "polysituatedness". The recent critical work Legibility: an anti-fascist poetics extends Kinsella's thinking around the intersections of pacifism, protest, human rights, animal rights, environmentalism, anarchism, veganism, and the role of poetry in resisting fascism.[20]

Kinsella is a frequent contributor, of both poetry and criticism, to the Australian newspaper The Saturday Paper.[21]

Academia

Kinsella was appointed Richard L Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College, United States, in 2001.[17] He also taught at Cambridge University,[3] where he was made a Fellow of Churchill College in 1997.[17]

He has also been adjunct professor of English at Edith Cowan University in Perth.[17]

In 2022 Kinsella was visiting DAAD professor in English at University of Tübingen, Germany.[4]

As of June 2026 he is emeritus professor in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University.[22]

Blog

Since 2008[23] and as of 2026 Kinsella co-hosts a blog with Tracy Ryan entitled "Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist", subtitled "A blog shared between poets John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan: vegan, anarchist, pacifist and feminist".[24]

Manuscript collections

Kinsella's manuscripts are housed in the University of Western Australia, the National Library of Australia, the University of New South Wales, Kenyon College, and the University of Leeds. The main collection is in Special Collections in the University of Western Australia Library.[25]

Awards

Personal life and views

Kinsella has called himself an anarchist since he was a teenager, and is a vegan, pacifist, and environmental activist.[23]

Bibliography

Poetry

Collections

  • The Frozen Sea (as John Heywood, 1983)
  • The Book of Two Faces: Poems. 1989.
  • Night Parrots. 1989.
  • Ultramarine: Poems (1991)
  • Eschatologies (1991)
  • Poems (1991)
  • Full Fathom Five (1993)
  • Syzygy (1993)
  • The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony: Poems (1995)
  • Erratum / Frame(d) (1995)
  • Intensities of Blue: Poems (1995)
  • The Radnoti Poems (1996)
  • Lightning Tree (1996)[36]
  • The Undertow: New and Selected Poems (1996)
  • Poems, 1980–1994 (1997)
  • Lines of Sight (1997)
  • The Hunt and Other Poems (1998)
  • Pine: Poems (1998)
  • Counter-Pastoral (1999)
  • Visitants (1999)[37]
  • Fenland Pastorals (1999)
  • Zone (2000)
  • Wheatlands (2000)[38]
  • Rivers (2002)
  • Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems (2003)
  • Doppler Effect (2004)
  • The New Arcadia (2005)
  • Love Sonnets (2006)
  • America, or Glow: (A Poem) (2006)
  • Divine Comedy: Journeys Through Regional Geography (2008)
  • Shades of the Sublime and Beautiful (2008)
  • Sacre Coeur–A Salt Tragedy (2009)
  • Sand with Robert Drewe (2010)
  • Armour (2011)
  • Synopticon (2012)
  • Jam Tree Gully: Poems (2011)[39]
  • The Ballad of Moondyne Joe (2012)
  • The Jaguar's Dream (2012)
  • The Vision of Error: A Sextet of Activist Poems (2013)
  • A Remarkable Grey Horse (2014)
  • Sack (2014)
  • Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (2016)[40]
  • Graphology Poems 1995-2015 (2016)
  • Firebreaks (2016)
  • On the Outskirts (2017)
  • Renga: 100 Poems (2017)
  • Polysituatedness: A Poetics of Displacement (2017)
  • The Wound (2018)
  • Open Door (2018)
  • Insomnia (2019)
  • Supervivid Depastoralism (2021)
  • Collected Poems, published by UWA Press
    • The Ascension of Sheep (Collected Poems, vol. 1) (2021)[3]
    • Harsh Hakea (Collected Poems, vol. 2) (2022)
    • Spirals (Collected Poems, vol. 3) (2024)
  • Ghost of Myself (2025)
  • The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems by John Kinsella (W. W. Norton, 2025)[41]

Selected list of poems

  • "Fall of windchime" (1989)[42][43]
  • "The Fable of the Great Sow" (2012)[44]
  • "Hiss" (2014)[45]

Novels

  • Genre (1997)[46]
  • Post-colonial (2009)[47]
  • Lucida Intervalla (2018)[48]
  • Hollow Earth (2019)[49]
  • Hotel Impossible (2020)[50]
  • Cellnight: a verse novel (2023)[51]
  • The Argonautica Inlandica (2023)[52]
  • Mahler Erasures (2024)[53]

Short fiction

Collections
  • Kinsella, John (1998). Grappling Eros : fiction.
  • Conspiracies (2003)
  • In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012)
  • Tide (Transit Lounge, 2013)
  • Crow's Breath and Other Stories (Transit Lounge, 2015)
  • Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017)
  • Pushing Back (2021)
  • Beam of Light (Transit Lounge, 2024)

Plays

  • Kinsella, John (2003). Divinations : four plays.

Non-fiction

  • Kinsella, John, ed. (1992). The bird catcher's song : a Salt anthology of contemporary poetry.
  • —, ed. (1995). Sightings : poems for International PEN 62nd World Congress.
  • —, ed. (1999). Landbridge : contemporary Australian poetry.
  • —, ed. (2002). The owner of my face : new and selected poems.
  • —, ed. (2002). Michael Dransfield : a retrospective.
  • —, ed. (2003). Western Australian writing : an online anthology.
  • —, ed. (2006). School days.
  • —, ed. (2008). Over there : poems from Singapore and Australia.
  • — (2008). Contrary rhetoric : lectures on landscape and language.
  • —, ed. (2009). The Penguin anthology of Australian poetry.
Autobiography / memoir
  • Kinsella, John (2001). Auto.
  • — (2006). Fast, Loose Beginnings: A Memoir of Intoxications.
  • — (2020). Displaced: A Rural Life.
Essays and reporting
Miscellaneous

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley by John Kinsella". AustLit. Retrieved 3 June 2025.
  2. ↑ ""Familiar territory: Changes of Tense"". The Cortland Review. Retrieved 3 June 2025.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Brooks, David (11 April 2022), The poem as pantechnicon, the poet as polymath: John Kinsella's boundless creativity, The Conversation, doi:10.64628/aa.d9vnadqa6
  4. 1 2 John Kinsella – DAAD Visiting Professor
  5. ↑ Kinsella, John. ""John Kinsella interviewed by Tracy Ryan" (Interview). Interviewed by Ryan, Tracy. Archived from the original on 26 November 2009. Retrieved 19 January 2009.
  6. ↑ "Welcome Aboard, John Kinsella" (PDF). Fellowship News. Series 2. Vol. 3, no. 3. April 2005. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 July 2008. Retrieved 19 August 2008.
  7. ↑ Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2012
  8. ↑ Christenberry, Faye. "Library Guides: Australian Literary Awards: Queensland Literary Awards". guides.lib.uw.edu.
  9. ↑ "Awards: Aussie Prime Minister's Literary". Shelf Awareness. 26 August 2013. Archived from the original on 24 October 2021. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
  10. ↑ "John Kinsella". Poetry International (in Dutch). 13 May 2017. Retrieved 30 June 2026.
  11. ↑ Kinsella, John (8 January 2012). "The Fable of the Great Sow". The New Yorker – via www.newyorker.com.
  12. ↑ Kinsella, John. "John Kinsella". London Review of Books.
  13. 1 2 3 4 "Austlit — John Kinsella — Bibliography". AustLit. Retrieved 3 June 2025.
  14. ↑ Arnold, Chris (4 June 2020). "Review of 'Displaced: A Rural Life' by John Kinsella".
  15. ↑ "Salt literary journal". National Library of Australia. Retrieved 19 May 2025.
  16. ↑ Kinsella, John (1 April 2003). "From Regional to International: The Story of Salt: An International Journal of Poetry and Poetics". The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 38 (2): 5–18. doi:10.1177/00219894030382002. ISSN 0021-9894.
  17. 1 2 3 4 5 "Guide to the Papers of John Kinsella". Trove. Retrieved 30 June 2026.
  18. ↑ "Austlit — John Kinsella". Austlit. Retrieved 3 June 2025.
  19. ↑ Durack, Lynda (27 July 2020). "2018". Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT).
  20. ↑ Kinsella, John (20 August 2022). Legibility: An Antifascist Poetics. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4. ISBN 978-3-030-85741-7 – via the UWA Profiles and Research Repository.
  21. ↑ "The Saturday Paper, author page — John Kinsella". The Saturday Paper. Retrieved 21 April 2026.
  22. ↑ "Emeritus Professor John Kinsella". Staff Profile. Retrieved 30 June 2026.
  23. 1 2 "Introduction". Mutually Said. 20 January 2008. Retrieved 30 June 2026. We are both committed, long-term vegans and pacifists, and John has called himself an anarchist since his teenage years... He is a deeply committed environmentalist and activist
  24. ↑ "Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist". Mutually Said. 5 June 2026. Retrieved 30 June 2026.
  25. ↑ Guide to Australian Literary Manuscripts Archived 11 November 2009 at the Wayback Machine
  26. ↑ ""Western Australian Premier's Book Awards : 1993"". LibraryThing. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  27. ↑ "Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature – Past Literary Award Winners". State Library of South Australia. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  28. ↑ "Austlit — Grace Leven Poetry Prize 1995-2001". Austlit. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  29. ↑ ""Western Australian Premier's Book Awards : 1998"". LibraryThing. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  30. ↑ ""A rich and varied harvest"". The Age, 29 August 1998, p8. ProQuest 2521660665. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  31. ↑ ""Western Australian Premier's Book Awards : 2003"". LibraryThing. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  32. 1 2 ""Queensland Premier's Literary Awards - Previous Winners"". Queensland Government. Archived from the original on 17 July 2012. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  33. ↑ ""Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2012"". The Wheeler Centre. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  34. ↑ "Austlit — Grace Leven Poetry Prize 2008-2012". Austlit. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  35. ↑ "Awards: Aussie Prime Minister's Literary". Shelf Awareness. 26 August 2013. Archived from the original on 24 October 2021. Retrieved 31 January 2026.
  36. ↑ Kinsella, John (2003), Lightning tree, Arc Publications, ISBN 978-1-86368-153-7
  37. ↑ Kinsella, John (1999), Visitants, Bloodaxe Books, ISBN 978-1-85224-505-4
  38. ↑ Hewett, Dorothy; Kinsella, John (2000), Wheatlands, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, ISBN 978-1-86368-279-4
    • The Hierarchy of Sheep (2001)
  39. ↑ Kinsella, John (2012), Jam tree gully: poems (First ed.), New York W.W. Norton & Co, ISBN 978-0-393-34140-9
  40. ↑ Kinsella, John (2016), Drowning in wheat: selected poems 1980-2015 (Main market ed.), Picador, ISBN 978-1-4472-2148-7
  41. ↑ Dings, Fred (January 2026). "The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems by John Kinsella". World Literature Today. Retrieved 30 June 2026.
  42. ↑ Night Parrots. 1989.
  43. ↑ "Fall of windchime". From Pen to Paper. The National Library of Australia Magazine. 6 (4): 7. December 2014.
  44. ↑ "The Fable of the Great Sow". The New Yorker. Vol. 87, no. 44. 16 January 2012.
  45. ↑ "Hiss". The New Yorker. Vol. 90, no. 22. 4 August 2014. p. 26.
  46. ↑ Kinsella, John (1997), Genre, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, ISBN 978-1-86368-192-6
  47. ↑ Kinsella, John; Birns, Nicholas (2009), Post-colonial : a récit, Papertiger Media, ISBN 978-0-9579411-7-5
  48. ↑ Kinsella, John (2018), Lucida intervalla, UWA Publishing, ISBN 978-1-76080-007-9
  49. ↑ Kinsella, John (September 2019), Hollow Earth, Transit Lounge Publishing (published 2019), ISBN 978-1-925760-27-9
  50. ↑ Kinsella, John (2020), "Hotel Impossible", CounterText, 6 (2): 239–381, doi:10.3366/count.2020.0196, ISSN 2056-4414, S2CID 241079559
  51. ↑ Kinsella, John (2023), Cellnight: a verse novel, Transit Lounge Publishing, ISBN 9780648414094
  52. ↑ "The Argonautica Inlandica by John Kinsella". National Library of Australia. Retrieved 15 August 2025.
  53. ↑ "Mahler Erasures by John Kinsella". Austlit. Retrieved 15 August 2025.
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