Peter Goldsworthy

Peter Goldsworthy AM (born 12 October 1951) is an Australian writer and medical practitioner. He has won awards for his short stories, poetry, novels, and opera libretti.

Goldsworthy has been described in A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry as "one of the most skilled and satisfying poets in Australia".

Goldsworthy was born in Minlaton, South Australia, and grew up in various Australian country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin in the Northern Territory. He graduated in medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1974, and worked in alcohol and drug rehabilitation for several years, but, with his poetry being published in Westerly and the Friendly Street Poetry Reader, he started dividing his working time equally between general practice and writing.

Goldsworthy's eldest daughter Anna is a successful concert pianist and also an accomplished writer. They worked together on a stage adaptation of Goldsworthy's novel Maestro.

Goldsworthy's novels have sold over 400,000 copies in Australia alone, and, with his poetry and short stories, have been translated into many European and Asian languages. He has won major literary prizes across most genres: for poetry, the short story, the novel, plays and opera.

His first novel Maestro was reissued as part of the Angus & Robertson Australian Classics series, and was voted one of the Top 40 Australian books of all time by members of the Australian Society of Authors.

His New Selected Poems were published in Australia and the UK in 2001; and his Collected Stories appeared in Australia in 2004.

The Poetry Archive describes his poetry as follows:

There's a pressing sense of mortality in his work and a desire to ask the big questions, even as he satirises them. Drawn to the discipline of science, Goldsworthy's poems are full of the language of the laboratory —matter, evidence, elements, chemicals— the stuff we are made of, but at the same time frustrated by these limitations into asking what else we might be. He's interested in 'The Dark Side of the Head', the things we can only know in flashes, like glimpsing a skink, but he also retains a rationalist's scepticism of the ecstatic – that "thoughtlessly exquisite" evening sky in 'Sunset' won't fool him into rapture.

...
Wikipedia