This is John Tranter’s homepage at:   johntranter.com

“John Tranter may now be Australia’s most important poet.”  — US Publishers’ Weekly, 2007

Including reviews, interviews, photos, and poems, this site offers more than a thousand printed pages of reading matter, and has been visited more than twenty thousand times. Enjoy!

Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (UQP, 2006, 322 pages) has been awarded:

 — The 2006 Victorian state award for poetry

 — The 2007 New South Wales state award for poetry

 — The 2008 South Australian state award for poetry, and

 — The 2008 South Australian Premier’s Prize for the best book overall (fiction, non-fiction, poetry and others for the years 2006 and 2007).

No other book of poetry has ever been so popular with the judges of so many different Australian awards. You can read the judges’ [»] readers’ reports here. You can download a read-only PDF file of the entire book here: [»] Urban Myths: 523 pages. You can also read 100 pages of notes to the book [»] here on this site, and you can order the (beautifully) printed version of the book direct from [»] the publisher.

Would you like to know the secret of John Tranter’s success? He always keeps this advice in mind, from [»] Screenwriting, a book by Richard Walter: When asked to offer his single most important piece of advice for writers, writer Tommy Thompson responded after a long, thoughtful pause:
          Every day, no matter what else you do, get dressed.

Photo, above left: John Tranter, casually dressed, Berlin, 2002

Note from John Tranter: This site began in 1998. It is not a weblog, updated every day. Instead, it grows gradually, and is designed to be a long-term useful resource for people wanting to know about my life and my work. It is already over a thousand pages long.

Here you can read my [»] poems, and read about my life (here’s a biographical [»] note) and what has formed my writing practice. There are [»] interviews with me and [»] reviews of my books (not all the reviews are favourable!) and [»] photos taken at various stages of my life.

Who am I? I sometimes wonder… My father wanted me to be a farmer, and I wanted to be a fighter pilot or a buddhist monk. What lonely occupations! Fortunately we were both wrong. I have been writing poetry for forty years; twenty books of poetry (here is a [»] list) and a book of experimental fiction, [»] Different Hands. I also edited four anthologies including co-editing the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991), published in Britain and the US as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. In 1997 I founded the free Internet literary magazine [»] Jacket.

APRIL

In 2004 I started a project to put thousands of Australian poems on the Internet. It has grown into the Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library (APRIL: what a nice acronym!) and has been funded with a half-million-dollar Linkage Grant from the Australian Research Council, starting in mid-2006. Professor Elizabeth Webby and Creagh Cole, from the University of Sydney, in association with [»] CAL (the Copyright Agency Limited), will head a team of researchers to built a permanent and wide-ranging library of resources on the University of Sydney Library Internet server. You can see how the work is progressing here: http://april.edu.au/

If you notice any typos or errors on this site, please let me know:
[»] Send an email to John Tranter

Reprinted!
The Floor of Heaven, a collection of four long loosely-linked narrative poems, reprinted by Jacket Press and distributed by the University of Queensland Press in June 2007.


‘A rattling good read!’
 — John Ashbery, launching the book in 1992

‘The Floor of Heaven is a tour de force, a devious and profoundly subversive conjuring trick by a poet writing at the peak of his powers… the book pulses with a curious resonance… reminded me irresistibly of the best moments in Twin Peaks… a strange lyricism.’
 — Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald

‘The Floor of Heaven is a hypnotic read; it will stay with you when you come out of your trance…’
 — Carmel Bird, Australian Book Review

‘… a crudity of feeling that gives many of his early poems the glazed, dated air of 70s airport lounges.… The Floor of Heaven is very dull reading and gets duller as the trash novel impetus of the narrative wears away… a literature of defeat.’
 — Alison Croggon, ABC Books and Writing

More free downloads! A free PDF file of [»] The Floor of Heaven. Like the Urban Myths file, this PDF file is free to download and read in its entirety, but it cannot be printed. Printed copies of this book can be purchased from [»] the publisher’s website or from the University of Queensland Bookshop mail order department: phone (617+) 3346 9434, fax (617+) 3365 1988 and email at
<benc[ât]uqp.uq.edu.au>

But wait! There’s more!
You can also download these two complete books in read-only Adobe Acrobat PDF format:
[»] The Blast Area: 38 pages
[»] Crying in Early Infancy: 55 pages

To read these files, you may need a copy of the free [»] Acrobat Reader

Search
You can search this site (use the search box below) for names, words or phrases; search facility kindly provided by Australia’s Culture and Recreation [»] Portal, Site ID 1377