Andrew Sant



Published titles :Album of Domestic Exiles
Russian Ink
Tremors, New and Selected Poems
Fuel
The Bicycle Thief & Other Poems
Andrew Sant was born in London in 1950 and educated there and in Melbourne after his family emigrated to Australia in 1962. He studied at La Trobe University and has travelled widely, working as a teacher, boatman and manager of a hostel for delinquent youth. For many years he was based in Hobart, Tasmania, although he has also spent several periods overseas and including as writer in residence at the University of Leicester and is currently in the United Kingdom. His poems have been widely published and anthologised, and he has received Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships, as well as a Centenary Medal for outstanding contribution to literature and education in Tasmania and short-listing for the Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize (1998) for Album of Domestic Exiles. He is a co-founder and was for ten years co-editor of the literary quarterly, Island, and has been an anthologist. Since 2000 he has been a writer-in-residence at institutions in England and China; in 2007-2008 he was Writing Fellow at the University of Chichester. Sant has travelled widely, giving readings in many European and Asian countries.

His books include Toads: Australian Writers: Other Work, Other Lives (1992) and (with Michael Denholm) First Rights: A Decade of Island Magazine (1989).

His poetry titles are Lives (1980), The Caught Sky (1982), The Flower Industry (1985), Brushing the Dark (1989), Album of Domestic Exiles (1997), Russian Ink (2001), The Islanders (2002), The Unmapped Page; Selected Poems (2004), Tremors, New & Selected Poems (2004), Speed & Other Liberties (2008) amd Fuel (2009). The Bicycle Thief (2013) is his latest book, published by Black Pepper (Picaro Press published a chapbook with an earlier version of the title poem, The Bicycle Thief, in 2010) .


If, as has been said, Sant is ‘an important, innovative poet’ with a ‘penetrating eye for the geometries of meaning’, it is because whatever his subject, the vision it draws out of him is there to be had and the subject, like the insight, has come as naturally to him as leaves are to trees.

Elizabeth Knottenbelt - Agenda (UK)