John Kinsella (poet)

John Kinsella (born 1963) is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. 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.

Early life and work
Kinsella was born in Perth, Western Australia. His mother was a poet and he began writing poetry as a child. He cites Judith Wright among his early influences. Before becoming a full-time writer, teacher and editor he worked in a variety of places, including laboratories, a fertiliser factory and on farms.

Later poetry and writing
Kinsella has published at least fifty books and his many awards include three Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, 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, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for poetry (twice) and the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry.

His poems have appeared in journals such as Stand, The Times Literary Supplement, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books 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). 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).

Kinsella is a vegan and has written about the ethics of vegetarianism. He has published various books of autobiographical writing including Auto (2001) and Displaced: A Rural Life (2020). He has also written plays, short stories and the novels Genre and Post-colonial.

Kinsella taught at Cambridge University, where he is a Fellow of Churchill College. Previously, he was Professor of English at Kenyon College, United States, where he was the Richard L Thomas Professor of Creative Writing in 2001. He is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University and Visiting DAAD Professor in English at University of Tübingen, Germany.

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.

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

Work as an editor and critic
Kinsella is a founding editor of the literary journal Salt, and was international editor of The Kenyon Review. 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.

He is editor of the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), and co-editor with Tracy Ryan of the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (2017).

His critical works include the poetics of place trilogy, Disclosed Poetics: beyond landscape and lyricism (2007), Polysituatedness (2017) 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.

Poetry
Collections •

•

• 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)

• 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)

• Fenland Pastorals (1999)

• Zone (2000)

• Wheatlands (2000)

• 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)

• Jam Tree Gully (2011)

• Sack (2014)

• Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (2016)
 * Insomnia (2019)
 * The Ascension of Sheep (Collected Poems, vol. 1) (2021)
 * Harsh Hakea (Collected Poems, vol. 2) (2022)

List of poems

Novels

 * Post-colonial (2009)
 * Lucida Intervalla (2018)
 * Hollow Earth (2019)
 * Hotel Impossible (2020)
 * Cellnight: a verse novel (2023)
 * Cellnight: a verse novel (2023)

Short fiction

 * Collections
 * 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)
 * Pushing Back (2021)

Non-fiction



 * Autobiography / memoir


 * Essays and reporting


 * Miscellaneous

Interviews

 * "The Poetry Kit Interviews John Kinsella", 1998
 * Overland literary journal, interviewed by Tracy Ryan, 24 November 2008