Mike Ladd (born 1959) is an Australian poet and radio presenter.[1]
Mike Ladd was born in Berkeley, California while his Australian parents were living and working in America, but he returned to Australia when he was one year old, and grew up in the Adelaide Hills. Ladd began writing poetry at a very young age, but took it up seriously while he was at the University of Adelaide, studying English and Philosophy. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1979. Then he joined a new wave rock band called “The Lounge” as a singer and lyricist and later travelled and worked in Europe and Africa. Returning to Australia, in 1983 he joined the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Adelaide where he currently works as the producer and presenter of Poetica, a weekly program of poetry broadcast on national radio. In 1987, he married the artist Cathy Brooks, and they have two children.
Influenced by the poetry of the Greek Anthology, the ancient Chinese and Japanese poets, Robert Frost, the European Minimalists and Nazim Hikmet, Ladd's poetry expresses deep ideas and feelings in simple but not simplistic language. His subject matter often combines natural elements with the suburban and industrial. He has collaborated with other artists and musicians, making poems for audio, film and installation works. He is the author of several video poems, including "Seaweed","The Fall", "Zoo After Dark", and "The Eye of the Day."
His first book, "The Crack in the Crib", focussed on childhood and suburbia. His second book, "Picture’s Edge", concentrated on geographical and social edges, the marginalised, and displaced. In "Close to Home" he celebrated the intimate joys and sorrows of family life, and in "Rooms and Sequences" he explored power games, politics and injustice in the wider world. "Transit", published in 2007, observes key transitional moments in life and well as physical journeys.
In 2006 Mike Ladd was awarded the Barbara Hanrahan fellowship and was a guest of Venezuela's World Poetry Festival. In 2009 he lived in Malaysia, at Rimbun Dahan, where he researched and wrote poems based on the traditional "Pantum" form. The video poem he made there called "The Eye of the Day" won equal first prize in the Overload Festival's Poetronica award for best multimedia poem in 2010.