UQP acquires exceptional debut poetry collection by Tim Loveday
UQP acquires exceptional debut poetry collection from poet and teacher Tim Loveday.
UQP is delighted to announce that we’ve acquired the debut poetry collection from Naarm-based poet and academic Tim Loveday. your father was a bastard is an impressive work, distinguished by its use of long-form narrative poetry and its examination of male violence as legacy. These poems recount stories, both archetypal and particular, of how this violence can shadow and permeate a family, and how people adapt to its presence and its threats.
A work of dark wit and understanding, it sings with tense, challenging critiques of contemporary masculinities, stressing the often-uncomfortable interrelationships between machismo, regionality, class, coloniality and the climate collapse.
Throughout, Loveday steers a clear course, offering a vulnerable interrogation of the damage done—and an insight intohow, in spite of it all, things might be different.
UQP has acquired world rights and will publish in May 2027.
Tim Loveday says:
‘I’m not sure when I realised that half the fathers in this country long to live their lives like a cowboy, that solitary figure struck between civilisation and the so-called savage. The life I think my father dreamed of as far back as his own boyhood when he longed to escape the long shadow of his own father, well before I longed to escape his. That’s where your father was a bastard comes from, a note to the undying Western – a recognition that masculinity, while sometimes myriad and multiple, is often densely archetypal, repetitive, cyclical, intensely interlinked with systems of colonisation and class and patriarchy, not to mention poetry itself. That’s what I hope this collection asks: is it possible to depart the house of a violent father, especially when that house is everywhere – especially when you are yourself that father?’
Publisher Aviva Tuffield says:
‘Tim Loveday is a poet and writer who has been on my radar for a long time. He comes highly recommended by his peers, his students and the writing industry at large. Over the past few years, he’s been sharpening his poetic tools and gaining in stature, amassing an impressive number of accolades along the way. His superb debut collection is a clear-sighted cultural critique of toxic masculinity and domestic abuse, and a nuanced examination of how formative these violences can be on the young male psyche. Formally inventive and beautifully crafted, your father was a bastard is a timely, lyrical work of interrogation and reflection, and I’m delighted that UQP gets to publish what I’m sure will be the first of Tim’s many books.’
About Tim Loveday
Tim Loveday is a poet, writer and baby academic. His work explores class, masculinity, online radicalisation and climate collapse. He won the 2022 and 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards, the 2025 Calanthe Prize, the 2025 High Country Poetry Award and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, came runner-up in the 2024 Cloncurry Poetry Prize, and was a finalist in the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize, the 2024 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Prize, the 2024 Best Australian Yarn, the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Unpublished Manuscript Award.
His work is widely published, including in Overland, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Island, Cordite, APJ,The Big Issue, Text, Meniscus and Writers Victoria, among many others.
Tim teaches Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne and RMIT. He is a current PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne where he is researching satirical representations of the manosphere. He regularly curates and hosts poetry-related events for Readings bookshop.
Tim is the poetry editor at Island magazine.
For more information, contact Jean Smith on jean.smith@uqp.com.au
