Caroline Caddy

Born in Perth to an Australian mother and an American father, poet Caroline Caddy grew up in the United States and Japan before returning to Australia as an adult. Caddy’s poems, lingering in the landscapes of China, Antarctica, and western Australia, explore identity through the process of travel and observation. Floating free of the left-hand margins, her poems make use of caesuras to emphasize the connections and gaps between cultures and geographies. “Creating a space that is both recognisable and uncanny, Caddy explores landscape in her early poems with both understanding and a deep seated wonder, the combination of which gives her poems great intensity,” observed Rosalind McFarlane in the Cordite Poetry Review.

Caddy is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Singing at Night (1980); Working Temple (1997); Esperance: New and Selected Poems (2007), which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize; and The Tibetan Cabinet (2010). Caddy has also won a Western Australian Premier's Book Award and a National Book Council Banjo Award. Her work appears in Australian journals such as Southerly and Westerly, in anthologies, and on Australian radio.

She divides her time between Shanghai and an olive farm in western Australia.