John Kinsella

John Kinsella is the author of more than seventy books of poetry, fiction, criticism, plays, edited works (such as The Penguin Book of Australian Poetry), and collaborative works. The three volumes of his Australian collected poems are The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022), Harsh Hakea (UWAP, 2023), and Spirals (UWAP, 2024). Other poetry books include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016), The Pastoraclasm (Salt, 2023), The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems (Norton, 2025), Ghost of Myself (UQP, 2025), and Aporia (Turtle Point Press, 2025). Recent critical books are Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017), Beyond Ambiguity: Tracing Sites of Literary Activism (MUP, 2021), and Legibility: An Antifascist Poetics (Palgrave, 2022). A frequent collaborator with other poets, writers, artists, musicians, and activists, Kinsella lives on stolen Ballardong Noongar land at ‘Jam Tree Gully’ in the Western Australian wheatbelt. In 2007, he received the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry and was awarded the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for Poetry for Jam Tree Gully (Norton, 2012). He is a vegan anarchist pacifist of four decades and a committed environmental, anti-colonial, human, and animal rights activist.