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John Kinsella

Australian poet and novelist

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.2

From Wikipedia’s article on John Kinsella (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born 1963.1

About

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.

From Wikipedia’s article on John Kinsella, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Early life and education

  • Date not recordedUniversity of Cambridge3
  • Date not recordedUniversity of Western Australia3

John Vincent Kinsella was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1963. 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.

From Wikipedia’s article on John Kinsella (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: poet.5

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. He has published some work under the pseudonyms "John Heywood" and "Ern Malley" (the latter referring to the Ern Malley literary hoax). His writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an "international regionalism" in his approach to place. He has said that all of his work is placed on a patch of land in the Western Australian wheatbelt. 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".

His 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.

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.

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

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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.

He was international editor of The Kenyon Review, an American journal. 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 was Cambridge correspondent for the Australian literary magazine Overland, and co-editor of the British literary journal Stand.

He edited the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), and co-edited, with Tracy Ryan, 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.

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

Academia

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

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

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

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

Blog

Since 2008 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".

From Wikipedia’s article on John Kinsella (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Personal life

  • CitizenshipAustralia6

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

From Wikipedia’s article on John Kinsella (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Awards

  • Date not recordedChristopher Brennan Award7

Sources

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