Dennis Haskell

Australian poet and academic

Australian Poet and Academic

Dennis Haskell

... is the author of seven collections of poetry published in Australia, the Philippines and the UK, and author or editor of fourteen volumes of literary scholarship and criticism. He is the recipient of the Western Australia Premier's Prize for Poetry, and the A. A. Philips Prize for a distinguished contribution to Australian Literature. In 2015 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia. He is currently a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia, where he received an honorary doctorate of letters in 2012. From 1985-2011 Haskell was co-editor of Westerly magazine and is … Read more about Dennis Haskell

News and Events

An antipodean Larkin with good manners, Haskell is a new kind of Australian poet, a mile-high-sky traveller, speeding on trains, stepping over countries, a 21st century transnational whose poems feel their way into an 'ordinariness' he has set as his goal.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The poems are astonishingly brave, and painful, even cruel, but never for a moment, for all their passionate feeling, either self-indulgent or self-regarding… It makes for painful reading, but is also a kind of liberation.

David Malouf (personal correspondence)

Haskell's shaping of language is highly skilful ... the language is heightened just that notch at the appropriate moment ... for the poetry to singe the reader's senses, jolt the mind or open a new window of perception on to the world.

Rod Moran

Biography

Dennis Haskell was born into a working class family in the western suburbs of Sydney; his father was a carpenter (d.1983) and his mother a florist. He attended primary schools in Croydon, Auburn West and Berala, before going on to Homebush Boys High School. He completed a Commerce degree at the University of New South Wales and worked as an accountant or lecturer in business studies for almost a decade, in Sydney and London. He travelled and … Read more about Biography