Prof. Mark Tredinnick

Mark Tredinnick OAM is a celebrated Australian poet, essayist and teacher, often called one of Australia’s great poets of place. He has won two of the world’s foremost poetry prizes, the Montreal International Poetry Prize (2011) and the Cardiff International Poetry Prize (2012), and in 2020 was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to literature and education. He is an Honorary President of the 2026 Sydney International Poetry Festival.

His honours also include China’s Tibetan Golden Antelope International Poetry Prize (2023), the Blake Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize (twice), the ACU Prize for Literature, the Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, two State Premiers’ literary awards and the Calibre Essay Prize. His poetry collections include A Beginner’s Guide, A Gathered Distance, Almost Everything I Know, Egret in a Ploughed Field, Bluewren Cantos, Fire Diary and Walking Underwater, and his landscape memoir The Blue Plateau was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Chain of Ponds: New and Selected Poems is due from 5 Islands Press in 2026.

His work has been translated into Chinese, German, French, Italian and Spanish; a hundred-poem selection, House of Thieves, was published in China in 2023, and in 2019 he was artist in residence at the Lu Xun Academy in Beijing. For thirty years he has taught poetry and expressive writing at the University of Sydney, where he was poet in residence in 2018. He lives in the Wingecarribee, south-west of Sydney.

Biography drawn from the poet’s own website, for his approval. A selected poem will be published here with the poet’s permission.