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Thea Astley:
Selected Poems
by Thea Astley Cheryl Taylor

This exciting collection by Australian literary legend Thea Astley brings together for the first time many poems that have never been seen or published.

A$24.95

(Paperback)

Available. Dispatched 2-3 business days

Overview

Winning multiple prizes for her fiction, including four Miles Franklin Awards, Astley’s earliest ambition was to write poetry. It remained her private passion throughout her student days and into adulthood. These surprising and satisfying poems chart her development as a writer, evoking wartime Brisbane, the natural landscape and small-town life.

Thea Astley: Selected Poems provides admirers of Astley’s fiction with unprecedented insight into an Australian literary legend.

Details

Australian Book Review

‘... often the poems have an ironic cast ...’

Paperbark Words blog

‘This collection is ultimately her study in self-discovery, ‘scientifically’ accurate, untainted and unrehearsed by any need to present them to the public.’

Rochford Street Review

‘Editor, Cheryl Taylor, has compiled Selected Poems in so that Astley’s writing seems unearthed, precious and intimate.’

Thea Astley

Australian writer Thea Astley (1925–2004) published seventeen novels and more than a dozen free-standing short stories.

She studied arts at The University of Queensland and held a position as Fellow in Australian Literature at Macquarie University until 1980, when she retired to write full-time. In 1989 she was granted an honorary doctorate of letters from The University of Queensland. Astley lived and wrote on the New South Wales south coast until her death in 2004.

Astley won the Miles Franklin Award four times – in 1962 for The Well Dressed Explorer, in 1965 for The Slow Natives, in 1972 for The Acolyte and in 2000 for Drylands. In 1989 she won the Patrick White Award. Other awards include the 1975 Age Book of the Year Award for A Kindness Cup, the 1980 Australian Literature Studies (ALS) Award for Hunting the Wild Pineapple, the 1986 ALS Gold Medal for Beachmasters, the 1988 Steele Rudd Award for It’s Raining in Mango, the 1990 NSW Premier’s Prize for Reaching Tin River, and the 1996 Age Book of the Year Award and the FAW Award for The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow.

Cheryl Taylor

Cheryl Taylor taught literature and effective writing at James Cook University for many years before retiring as an Associate Professor in 2006. Since moving to Brisbane’s bayside, she has held teaching and research positions at Griffith University. She has edited books and published articles on Middle English and Medieval Latin literature and the literature of spirituality. Her publications on Australian literature, which include the editing of a regional subset within the AustLit database, have dealt mainly with Queensland writers.