Mark Tredinnick
Mark Tredinnick, whose eighteen books include A Gathered Distance, Almost Everything I Know, Egret in a Ploughed Field, Bluewren Cantos, Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Red Writing Book—is a celebrated poet, essayist, and writing teacher. “One of our great poets of place,” Judy Beveridge has called him. In 2020, Mark was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for services to literature and education.
His other honours include the Montreal and Cardiff Poetry Prizes, The Blake and Newcastle Poetry Prizes, the ACU and Ron Pretty Poetry Prizes, two Premiers’ Literature Awards, and the Calibre Essay Prize. The Blue Plateau, his landscape memoir, shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize.
Mark's poetry is translated into many languages. In recent years it has become widely known in China. A selection of Mark’s poems translated by Isabelle Li appeared in Famous Writing in World Literature, published by ZZHW (The Writers Publishing House), in November 2017. In November 2017 Mark was a guest of the Hong Kong International Poetry Nights (in Hong Kong and Hangzhou); in November 2018, he was a guest of the Xichang Silk Road International Poetry Festival; and in 2019, he spent a month in residence at the Lu Xun Academy in Beijing, a guest of the International Writers Program.
In July 2012, Mark was a guest of the Oxford Literature Festival; in September 2018, the Berlin International Literature Festival.
Sir Andrew Motion has written of Mark Tredinnick: “his is a bold, big-thinking poetry, in which ancient themes (especially the theme of our human relationship with landscape) are recast and rekindled.” Jane Hirshfield has written: “Mark Tredinnick’s are among the only long poems I find myself actively wanting to read.”
Mark Tredinnick’s latest work is A Gathered Distance: Poems (BirdFish, 2020), and his next collection, Walking Underwater, appears in June 2020 with Pitt Street. Another collection, A Beginner’s Guide (Recent Works), and a new and selected poems (Milkweed) appear in early 2021. Mark is also at work on a memoir of the reading life, Reading Slowly at the End of Time.