Judy Johnson was
born in 1961. She has won the Josephine
Ulrick Poetry Prize, the Val
Vallis Queensland Arts Award and the Regional section of the Newcastle
Poetry Prize (all in 2002) as well as the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize
(2001), the Tom Collins Poetry Prize (1995 and 1998), the Roland
Robinson Poetry Award (2000), the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award
(1998) and the WB Yeats Poetry Prize (1998 and 2000).
Her chapbook of poetry, Wing Corrections, was
published by Five
Islands Press in 1998 and came second in the Anne Elder Award and was
on the Year 11 literature list in Western Australia for two years.
Since 1998 she has been published widely, including with her chapbook Light and Skin
(1992), published by
Picaro Press. She has received several grants from
the Australia
Council, including to write full-time in 2004. She has completed one
verse novel regarding the pearling
industry in Torres Strait in the 1930s, which takes the form of a
series of dramatic monologues written in the voice of a pearl lugger’s
captain. She is currently researching a second verse novel. She lives
in Newcastle with her three children. An earlier version of Nomadic won the
Wesley Michel Wright Award.