An Open Book

Description

An Open Book celebrates the power of poetry and reaffirms David Malouf as one of Australia's most celebrated and beloved writers. This is only David Malouf's third new poetry volume in nearly 40 years, so it is a significant publishing event. As one of Australia's greatest living poets, Malouf continues to meditate and reflect on themes of mortality and memory. The poems in An Open Book are attentive and evocative, vital and beautiful, revisiting and reimagining some of the key themes that have resonated with readers over his impressive career. Like the 'small comfort of light . . . as night comes on', Malouf's new poems hold close the precious and tender. Only a few of these poems have ever been published, so most of the collection will be completely new to readers everywhere. An Open Book will be the literary gift of the Christmas and summer of 2018.

David Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934. Since 'Interiors' in Four Poets, 1962, he has published poetry, novels and short stories, essays, opera librettos and a play, and is widely translated. His most recent poetry volumes include Typewriter Music (UQP, 2007) and his selected poems, Revolving Days, (UQP, 2008). Earth Hour (UQP, 2014), won both the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. Malouf was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1987 and elected an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1989. In 1997 he was declared an Australian National Living Treasure, while he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000.