Anne
Fairbairn, born in 1948, is a granddaughter of poet and politician
George Houston Reid (1845-1918). She is a widely
published Australian poet. She has won the Banjo Paterson Writing Award
for Open Poetry (1995). Her translation of Arabic poetry
Feathers and the Horizon
(Leros
Press, 1989) received international acclaim. She is also the author of
Shadows of Our Dreaming; a
celebration of
early Australia (Angus and
Robertson, 1983), with haiku-like poems set beside her evocative black
and white drawings, and
Djuringa
Haiku.
Her own
poetry has been translated and published in Arabic, Persian and
Turkish. She won the 1995 Banjo Patterson Centenary Award for her poem
‘High
Country Dreaming
’.
She has lectured
extensively at universities
in the Arab world and Asia on Australian poetry and has translated the
work of Lebanese-Australian poet Wadih Sa
’adeh
and others in
A Secret
Sky
(Ginninderra Press,
1997). She became a member of the Order of Australia in 1998 for
services to literature as a poet and to international relations,
particularly between Australia and the Middle East.
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