Biography
Paul Hetherington's parents are Robert Hetherington (1923–2015) and Penelope Hetherington (née Loveday) (1928–). He grew up in Adelaide with his twin brother Mark and his younger sister Naomi (1961–) until his family moved to Perth in 1966 when his father accepted a job in the fledgling Politics Department of the University of Western Australia. His father later became a Western Australian member of parliament. His mother was an academic historian with particular interests in African History and Women's History, who worked at the University of Western Australia. Hetherington undertook his undergraduate studies at the University of Western Australia, achieving a double major in English and History and at the end of his honours year in 1984 was awarded three undergraduate prizes. He completed a doctoral thesis at the same university in 1989 on the topic '"The Representative of the Verse": Death, Crisis and Versions of the Self in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson'. In his twenties he performed, wrote and directed for different amateur theatre groups. He lived as Michelle Frances Combs' partner from 1980 and they married in 1985. Their daughters are Suzannah and Rebecca. Hetherington worked as a sessional tutor while undertaking postgraduate studies and then accepted the job of Publications and Events Coordinator at Fremantle Arts Centre in 1989. In 1990 he moved to the National Library as Education Manager and editor of ''National Library News'' (1990 to 2009). In 1994 he became director of the Library's Publications Branch and from 1999 to 2009 directed the Publications and Events Branch, where his responsibilities included book publishing, website development and a program of conferences. After leaving the National Library of Australia he became Assistant Professor of Writing in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra in 2010 and is now Professor of Writing there. He is head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) which was co-founded with Jen Webb and post-doctoral fellow Paul Munden. He is a co-founder of the International Prose Poetry Project, which he says, 'I started that, really by accident, by sending a prose poem to a couple of colleagues of mine at the University of Canberra'. He has played a significant role in the ACT cultural community, serving on numerous boards and helping to found the ACT Writers Centre in the mid-1990s and chairing its inaugural committee of management. He also chaired the ACT Cultural Council (2005–13) and the ACT Public Art Panel (2006–11). He is a former Deputy Chair of the ACT's Word Festival. He was a board member for the arts magazine ''Muse''. Nationally he was a member of the Board of ''Australian Book Review'' (2004–12).Poetry career
Hetherington's career as a writer spans more than 30 years, and he has published 12 full-length poetry collections and six poetry chapbooks, along with numerous academic articles. He has spoken of deciding to write poetry at the age of 11 and has commented that 'One of the ways I recognise the poetic is when I find works in which language is condensed, ramifying, polysemous and unparaphraseable.' After achieving journal and magazine publication of his poems throughout the 1980s, the National Library of Australia published Hetherington's poetry chapbook, ''Mapping Wildwood Road'' in 1990 and Fremantle Arts Centre Press published ''Acts Themselves Trivial'', his first full-length poetry collection in 1991. Molonglo Press in the ACT published his next four poetry books, including ''Shadow Swimmer'', which won the 1996 ACT Book of the Year Award. Pandanus Books at the ANU then released his verse novel ''Blood and Old Belief'' in 2003. ''It Feels Like Disbelief'' was published in 2007 by Salt Publishing (Cambridge, UK). Three recent volumes, ''Six Different Windows'' (2013) – which won the 2014 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards (poetry) – and ''Burnt Umber'' (2016) - shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry - and ''Moonlight on Oleander: Prose Poems'' (2018) have been released by UWA Publishing. Hetherington has said that ''Burnt Umber'' marked something of a new departure for him 'in a couple of ways … One of them is the presence of prose poetry in the collection … The other thing that's different is the ekphrastic poetry in the book.' ''Moonlight on Oleander'' extends Hetherington's interest in the prose poem form and is one of relatively few books consisting solely of prose poetry to have been published in Australia in the last decade. In 2002 Hetherington was awarded a Chief Minister's ACT Creative Arts Fellowship and in 2012 was awarded one of two places on the Australian Poetry Tour to Ireland, accompanied by Melbourne poet Petra White. In 2014 he was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Section Residency in the BR Whiting Studio in Rome for a practice-led research project entitled 'Roman Paintings' and while in Rome read at the Keats-Shelley House. In 2017 he won the Individual Research Excellence Award, Humanities and Creative Arts at the University of Canberra.Critical response to Hetherington's poetry
In reviewing Hetherington's ''Acts Themselves Trivial'' (1991), Simon Patton writes that 'the insight is certainly compelling. The desire to remember is established in these poems as a vital aspect of our humanity'. Shirley Walker writes of ''Shadow Swimmer'' (1995) that 'This is poetry of glowing sensuality, of urgent narrative pace, of tact in its exploration of intimate experience.' Glenda Guest remarks of the verse novel, ''Blood and Old Belief'' (2003) that 'Hetherington's writing is immaculate; he finds the hidden nuances at the core of each person', while Paul Kane characterises Hetherington's style in ''It Feels Like Disbelief'' (2007) as 'similarly lucid in voice, diction and image. This felicitous combination gives his poems the feel of poise, intelligence, grace and finish.' Peter Pierce comments that ''Six Different Windows'' (2013) is 'one fthe finest collections of poetry this year' and Mags Webster writes that ''Burnt Umber'' (2016) 'is a fine example of language – and poetry – "doing itself right"': 'If paintings can be "read" like text, then Hetherington's fusion of word and image bring to mind Howard Nemerov's suggestion that "both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language". Hetherington's poems are tender, sometimes playful, sometimes self-deprecating, and in the case of 'Painting 22: ''Portrait of a Count','' which appears in tribute to the poet's father, achingly poignant'.As editor
Paul Hetherington was co-editor in 1983 with Victor Bivoltsis and Andrew Masterson of a short-lived literary journal ''Perverse Pleasures.'' He became Associate Editor of ''Fremantle Arts Review''in 1989 and editor of the magazine later that year. He was founding editor of ''Voices: the Quarterly Journal of the National Library of Australia'' from 1991 to 1997 and Editor of ''National Library of Australia News'' from 1990 to 2009. He was Poetry Editor of the ''There are some things in the diaries obviously that some people will find less attractive than others, but in publishing them, we wanted to publish the diaries as they are, more or less, with the sensitivity that I talked about earlier, because we think that it's important that people can read the material for themselves and make their own mind up about them.In 2010 Hetherington was for a time the consultant Managing Editor to establish the National Library of Australia's project to publish in association with Australian Capital Equity, ''Pierre Bernard Milius: Last commander of the Baudin expedition: the journal 1800–1804.'' He is co-founding editor of the international online journal ''Axon: Creative Explorations'' (2011-) and a founding editorial committee member of the ''Meniscus'' journal (2013–). In 2014 he was co-editor with Shane Strange and Jen Webb of the scholarly book ''Creative Manoeuvres: Writing, Making, Being''. In 2016 he was co-editor with Jen Webb of the bilingual ''Open Windows: Contemporary Australian Poetry – An English-Chinese Anthology'' (transl Tao Naikan) and in that year he was co-poetry editor with Cassandra Atherton for the poems in a prose poem issue of ''Rabbit: A Journal for Nonfiction Poetry'' and a special issue of ''Cordite Poetry Review'' on ekphrastic poetry, published in March 2017.
Works
Full-length poetry collections
1991: ''Acts Themselves Trivial'', Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press () 1993: ''The Dancing Scorpion'', Canberra: Molonglo Press () 1995: ''Shadow Swimmer'', Canberra: Molonglo Press () 1998: ''Canvas Light'', Canberra: Molonglo Press () 2001: ''Stepping Away: Selected Poems'', Canberra: Molonglo Press () 2007: ''It Feels Like Disbelief'', Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing () 2013: ''Six Different Windows,'' Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Publishing () 2015 (with Jen Webb as photographer): ''Watching the World: Impressions of Canberra'', Canberra: Blemish Books () 2016: ''Burnt Umber'', Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Publishing () 2016: ''Gallery of Antique Art'', Canberra: Recent Work Press () 2017: ''Ìkaros''. Canberra: Recent Work Press () 2018: ''Moonlight on Oleander'', Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing ()Poetry chapbooks
1990: ''Mapping Wildwood Road'', Pamphlet Poets, Series One, No. 4, Canberra: National Library of Australia () 2012: ''Chicken and Other Poems'', ed. Judy Johnson'', Wagtail'' 119, Picaro Press (ISSN 1444-8424) 2013 (with Anita Fitton as digital artist): ' 'Spectral resemblances' ', Belconnen, ACT Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra () 2015 (with Cassandra Atherton, Paul Munden, Jen Webb, Jordan Williams): ''Jars'' IPSI Series: Authorised Theft, Canberra, ACT : International Poetry Studies Institute, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra () 2016 (with Cassandra Atherton, Paul Munden, Jen Webb, Jordan Williams): ''The Taoist Elements: Earth'' IPSI Series: Authorised Theft, Kambah, ACT: Recent Work Press () 2017 (with Cassandra Atherton, Paul Munden, Jen Webb, Jordan Williams): ''Colours: Blue,'' IPSI Series: Authorised Theft, Kambah, ACT: Recent Work Press ()Verse novel
2003: ''Blood and Old Belief: A Verse Novel'', Canberra, ANU: Pandanus Books ()As editor
2003: ''The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 2'', National Library of Australia, Canberra () 2005: ''The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 3'', National Library of Australia, Canberra () 2006: ''The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 4'', National Library of Australia, Canberra () 2014: (with Shane Strange and Jen Webb): ''Creative Manoeuvres: Writing, Making, Being'', Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing () 2016: ' 'Chuang kou : dang dai Aodaliya shi ge : Zhong Ying shuang yu xuan ji' ', oZhen Weibo (Jen Webb), Baoluo Heselindun (Paul Hetherington) zhu bian ; Tao Naikan yi, Shanghai : Shanghai san lian shu dian ()Collaborations
Hetherington has written, published and exhibited collaboratively with various writers, artists and scholars. These are Jordan Williams, Anita Fitton, Jen Webb, Antonia Pont, Judith Crispin,Awards
Among the awards Hetherington has received are: *1996: Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Book of the Year *1997: ANUTECH Poetry Prize *2002: Chief Minister's ACT Creative Arts Fellowship *2012: Australian Poetry Tour to Ireland, the Australian Poetry organisation (one of two positions) *2014: Western Australian Premier's Book Awards (poetry) *2014: Australia Council for the Arts Literature Section Residency in the BR Whiting Studio in Rome *2017: Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Achievements in Research or Innovation, University of Canberra (part of the eight-member Creativity and Social Change Team, the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research) (co-winner) *2017: Individual Research Excellence Award, Humanities and Creative Arts, the annual Awards for Research and Innovation Excellence, University of Canberra *2021: Bruce Dawe National Poetry PrizeReferences
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hetherington, Paul 1958 births Living people Academic staff of the University of Canberra Australian poets