Stephen Edgar

Stephen Edgar was born in Sydney, Australia. He studied classics and English at the University of Tasmania and has worked as an editor and a librarian. He is the author of the poetry collections Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground (2003), Other Summers (2006), and History of the Day (2009).

A lyric formalist, Edgar probes the ordinary and often overlooked details of life. Attentive to the natural world, his work touches on memory, science, and observations of personal and historical events and uses regular stanzas and subtle rhymes. Gregory Kratzmann, reviewing Other Summers for the Australian Book Review, noted that Edgar’s “form exists in delicate equipoise with a passionate and highly individual vision of the world. The range of this vision is impressively wide, from the elegies for lost lovers to gentle tributes to parents, from political and social satire to gazes into the realm of nightmare.”

Edgar’s awards include the Harri Jones Memorial Prize, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize, and the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature. He has twice received the William Baylebridge Memorial Prize.

Edgar has been poetry editor of Island magazine. He has lived in London and Hobart and currently resides in Sydney.