Born Born in 1962, Alison Croggon is one of a generation of Australian poets which emerged in the 1990s.  She writes in many genres, including criticism, theatre and prose. She is Melbourne theatre critic for the national daily newspaper, The Australian, and keeps a blog of theatre criticism, Theatre Notes.

Her poetry has been published widely in anthologies and magazines in Australia and overseas. Her most recent poetry publication is a chapbook, Ash (Cusp Books, Los Angeles 2007). A new full collection, Theatre, is forthcoming in 2008 from Salt Publishing. Other titles include November Burning (Vagabond Press Rare Objects Series, Sydney, 2004); Mnemosyne,  (Wild Honey Press, Ireland, 2001); The Common Flesh (New and Selected Poems) (Arc Publications, UK, 2003) and Attempts at Being, (Salt Publishing, UK, 2002).

Her first book of poems, This is the Stone, won the 1991 Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore Prizes. Her novel Navigatio, published by Black Pepper Press, was highly commended in the 1995 Australian/Vogel literary awards and is being translated for publication in France. Her second book of poems, The Blue Gate, was released in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Poetry Prize. Attempts at Being was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards and also was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the US.

She has toured frequently in the UK and the US, among other things reading at the Poetry International Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London, the Soundeye International Poetry Festival in Cork, and the New Writing symposium at the University of East Anglia. In 2000 she was the Australia Council Writer in Residence at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge (UK).

Alison Croggon is also the author of the acclaimed young adult fantasy quartet, The Books of Pellinor. The first volume was nominated in two categories in the Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction in December 2002 and named one of the Notable Books of 2003 by the Children's Book Council of Australia. The series has since been released to critical and popular acclaim in the US, the UK and Germany.

Alison has to date written and had performed nine works for theatre.  Her theatre work includes the operas Gauguin (Melbourne Festival 2000) and The Burrow (Perth Festival, Sydney, Melbourne 1994-95 and broadcast by ABC Radio), both with Michael Smetanin. Her performed plays include Lenz (Melbourne Festival 1996), Samarkand and The Famine (Rules of Thumb season, Red Shed Company, Adelaide 1997 and ABC Radio 1998), Blue (CIA, La Mama, Melbourne and the Street Theatre, Canberra, 2001). ABC Radio commissions include Monologues for an Apocalypse (2001) and Specula (2006). She also wrote lyrics for Confidentially Yours (Playbox Theatre 1998, Hong Kong Festival 1999).

Many of her poems have been set to music by various composers, including Smetanin (Skinless Kiss of Angels, Elision New Music Emsemble), Christine McCombe and Margaret Legge-Wilkinson (Canberra New Music Ensemble) and most recently Andreé Greenwell.

She was a member of of the 2005 and 2006 Artistic Counsels for the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, and is currently on the advisory panel for the Green Room Awards. She was poetry editor for Overland Extra (1992), Modern Writing (1992-1994) and Voices (1996) and is founding editor of the literary arts journal Masthead.

In 2003 she was also the organiser of the Australian wing of Poets Against the War, and within a week collected poems from more than 100 Australian poets which were delivered to the Prime Minister Mr Howard in protest against the impending war against Iraq.

What Others Say

Alison Croggon has from the beginning of her career demanded attention (gaining an entry in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 1994, on the strength of one book). She is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today. 
        —Australian Book Review

I think I have just stumbled across Dransfield's successor... This book [Attempts at Being] will dictate what many of us do as poets in the unfolding decade, mark my words. 
        —Cordite Poetry Review

Croggon continually surprises and delights with an almost eerily fresh outlook on events and emotions. Never is this poet more intriguing and enigmatic than when she moves into more esoteric poetic landscapes... Her startling imagery and unique word combinations inject a sharp twist to the ordinary. [She is] at the very forefront of modern Australian poetry. She remains a uniquely-voiced, assured writer very much in control of her craft.
        —ArtStreams

It is in the supra-personal realm that these two most interestingly experimental poets [MTC Cronin and Alison Croggon] of the experimentalists seem to be going. Their lyric "I" is not the often vapid, dull but clever "I" or lack of it that often prevails in some curiously passive male poetry. Both Cronin and Croggon accord with Tielhard de Chardin who, in The Phenonenon of Man, states: "To be fully ourselves it is ... in the direction of covergence with the rest that we must advance - towards the other"... [They have] a poetic voice flexible enough to avoid the fixity and biographical connection that makes the first person problematic. ... These poets transcend sexual difference. They also transcend the lyric "I", not by defusing it in a polymorphous voice, but by being innovative in a different way from the American Language poets. They accept the solipsism of existence and the consequent emotive authority of the self as the traditional core of what constitutes poetry. Yet they are profoundly liberated from the oppressive politics of the narrow self. 
        —Agenda

Links

Alison Croggon

Theatre notes — Alison Croggon's theatre review and discussion blog

Masthead Ezine — Literary arts ezine edited by Alison Croggon

Poetry Archive audio recordings

The Books of Pellinor