Lionel Fogarty

Lionel Fogarty (b. 1958, Cherbourg, Australia) is a Murri man, born on Wakka Wakka land at Cherbourg mission. In his writing he demonstrates that he is a poet of language as much as of politics, repurposing both traditional poetics and the speech of his people to delineate current circumstances of oppression alongside a vision of independent Aboriginal identity. His books have won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry in 2012 and the Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2015. In 2017, Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017 (edited by Philip Morrissey & Tyne Dale) was published by Re-press, covering nearly forty years of his writing. A self-proscribed street-activist, Fogarty has never fallen short of living a life of justice and poetics. Today, Fogarty lives on his own country at Undullah (Mulinjari country). In 2022 he released a new collection of poetry through Giramondo Press, “Harvest Lingo”.