Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 21 March
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Poet, essayist, journalist, critic, editor, novelist, historian, librettist – Barry Hill is one of Australia’s most versatile and distinguished writers; he has won Premier's Awards for poetry, non-fiction, and the essay.
Across genre, form and discipline, he’s been drawn again and again to the big subjects: questions of history, human psychology, politics and spirituality.
His new book, Reason and Lovelessness, is testament to the breadth and depth of his contribution to Australian writing. A collection of 32 essays from 1980 to today, it covers real-life encounters with the Dalai Lama and Christina Stead; critical appreciations of the work of Rai Gaita, Ezra Pound and John Berger; commentary on Australian politics and accounts of Hill’s own travels.
In conversation with literary critic Justin Clemens, Hill will discuss essaying on lovelessness.
Embiggen Books will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Barry Hill
Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, history, biography, fiction and reportage.
Reason and Lovelessness is his latest collection of essays variously published in Australia, India and London. It includes ‘satellites’ of his major works – such as Sitting In (1992), a landmark memoir in labour history; Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), a literary biography on Aboriginal and frontier poetics; and Peacemongers (2014), a pilgrimage book about Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi in the years leading up to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Other essays are new: ‘Brecht’s Song’, on his working-class mother; ‘Dark Star’, an expansion of his meeting with Christina Stead on her 80th birthday; ‘Loving Roughneck’, his critical appreciation of John Berger; and ‘On the Edge of the Cliff’, on his private meeting with the Dalai Lama in the Blue Mountains.
As has been the case with his book-length works, Hill’s essays collected in Reason and Lovelessness are freshly, deeply researched, genre-crossing, multi-disciplinary, combining the candidly personal with the philosophical.
Hill was born in Australia and educated in Melbourne and London, where he worked as a psychologist and a journalist (the Age and the Times Educational Supplement). He has been writing full-time since 1975.
His short fiction has been widely anthologized, some of it translated into Chinese and Japanese. He writes libretti and has done much work for radio. Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Knopf 2002) has been described as ‘one of the great Australian books’ (John Mulvaney) and ‘a major event in Australian high culture’ (Robert Manne). Necessity: Poems 1996-2006 won the ACT’s 2008 Judith Wright Prize. Lines for Birds, collaboration with the painter, John Wolseley, was short-listed for the 2011 Queensland Premier’s Award. His latest book is Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud.
Hill also worked as a radio critic on the Age for 15 years. Between 1998 and 2008, he was Poetry Editor of the Australian, and between 2005 and 2008 was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne. For decades, he has aspired to be a good Buddhist.
Justin Clemens
Justin Clemens is a philosopher, translator, social critic, poet and academic. He has published three collections of poetry, The Mundiad (Black Inc, 2004), Villain (Hunter Publishers, 2009) and Me ‘n’ me trumpet (Vagabond, 2011).
Justin is primarily known for his work on French philosopher Alain Badiou as an editor, translator and scholar. He teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is Secretary of the Lacan Circle of Melbourne and art critic for the Australian magazine The Monthly.