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John Tranter | |
|---|---|
 Tranter with his grandson in 2005 | |
| Born | (1943-04-29)29 April 1943 Cooma, New South Wales, Australia |
| Died | 21 April 2023(2023-04-21) (aged 79) Sydney, Australia |
| Occupation(s) | Poet, publisher, editor |
| Known for | Poetry |
John Ernest Tranter (29 April 1943 – 21 April 2023) was an Australian poet, publisher and editor. He published more than twenty books of poetry; devising, with Jan Garrett, the long runningABC radio programBooks and Writing; and founding in 1997 the internet quarterly literary magazineJacket which he published and edited until 2010, when he gave it to theUniversity of Pennsylvania.[1]
TheAustralia Council awarded him a Creative Arts Fellowship in 1990; some Australian poets "acknowledge his role as innovator and experimentalist".[2]
Tranter was born inCooma, New South Wales and attended country schools, then took hisBA in 1970 after attending university sporadically.[citation needed] He worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, making more than twenty reading tours to venues in the United States, in Britain and Europe since the mid-1980s. He lived inSydney,Melbourne andBrisbane in Australia, and overseas in London,Cambridge, Singapore, Florida, and San Francisco.[citation needed] He spent most of his life in Sydney, where he was a company director (with his wife Lyn) of Australian Literary Management, a leading literary agency. He was married to Lyn, with adult children Kirsten and Leon, and in 2009 completed a Doctorate of Creative ArtsUniversity of Wollongong (conferred, highly commended).[citation needed]
Tranter died on 21 April 2023, at the age of 79.[3]
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In 1975, Tranter co-designed the firstBooks & Writing radio program for theAustralian Broadcasting Corporation, a program format which was still going strong thirty years later. During 1987 and 1988, he was the executive producer in charge of theABC Radio National weekly two-hour arts programRadio Helicon,[4] and from 1990 to 1993 he was the poetry editor ofThe Bulletin, the venerable Australian weekly magazine of politics, business, and the arts.
Tranter received many fellowships and other grants, and had been a visiting scholar at various institutions, from visiting fellow in the Faculty of Arts at theAustralian National University to writer-in-residence atRollins College inWinter Park, Florida and atCambridge University in England. He published over twenty volumes of poetry, includingUrban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2006) andStarlight: 150 Poems (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2010).
HisStarlight: 150 Poems, published by theUniversity of Queensland Press, won the Queensland State Literary Award for poetry and the Age Book of the Year award for poetry in 2011, andUrban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected, published by theUniversity of Queensland Press, won the Victorian Premier's Prize for poetry in 2006, the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize in 2007, the South Australian Premier's Awards John Bray prize for poetry in 2008 and the South Australian Premier's Awards Premier's Prize for the best book overall (2006 and 2007) in 2008. HisUnder Berlin, published by theUniversity of Queensland Press, won theKenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (the New South Wales State Literary Award for Poetry) in 1989, andAt The Florida won the Melbourne Age 'Book of the Year' award for poetry in 1993. Other recent books areThe Floor of Heaven (Harper Collins, 1992), a book-length sequence of four verse narratives, the poetry collectionsLate Night Radio (Polygon,Edinburgh, UK, 1998),Heart Print (Salt, Cambridge, UK, 2001),Different Hands (Folio/ Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Cambridge and Western Australia, 1998), a collection of seven experimental computer-assisted prose pieces,Borrowed Voices (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2002), a dozen reinterpretations of poems by other poets,Studio Moon andTrio (both Salt Publications, UK, 2003).
Tranter compiled and editedThe Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry with Philip Mead in 1991. Earlier anthologies include the controversialThe New Australian Poetry (Makar, Brisbane, 1979), and a selection of ninety-four poems from theAustralian bicentennial poetry competition in 1988, published by ABC Books asThe Tin Wash Dish.
In 2004 he built a free prototype internet site that presented biographical and bibliographical information about over seventy Australian poets as well as poems, book reviews and interviews. In 2005 he handed the project over to a consortium consisting of theUniversity of Sydney English Department, theUniversity of Sydney Library and theCopyright Agency Limited. In 2006 the consortium was granted half a million dollars by theAustralian Research Council to further extend the work as a research project as theAustralian Poetry Library with an internet site hosted by the University of Sydney Library. The project was launched atState Government House, Sydney, on 25 May 2011, by which time it featured over 42,000 poems by Australian poets from 1800 to the present.
In 2014 John Tranter founded theJournal of Poetics Research with three other Managing Editors: DrKate Lilley, University of Sydney; Dr Ann Vickery,Deakin University; and Professor Philip Mead,University of Western Australia; and some thirty other (mostly international) editors. The first (free) issue was published at the end of September 2014, and two issues per year, in March and September, were planned at that time.
At one time the executive producer of Radio Helicon was the poet John Tranter.
