Philip Salom

Philip Salom (born 8 August 1950) is a contemporary Australian poet and novelist.

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Biography

Growing up on a farm in Brunswick Junction in the South West region of Western Australia. Salom had an isolated childhood before boarding at Bunbury during his high school years. He went on to study agriculture at Muresk Agricultural College and then worked for two years as a research assistant on the Northam Research Station. While studying Agricultural Science at University of Western Australia he developed his passion for the arts, painting and singing in the university choir. Uninterested in his course he left university, took various casual jobs, and started writing on a 1972 painting trip to New Zealand. On returning to Perth he enrolled in Curtin University's Literature and Creative Writing course, one of the first of its kind in Australia.

On graduating he took a job with the public service in his old area of agriculture. His first poetry collection was published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1980. Since then there have been many poetry collections and two novels. Salom has won both national and international acclaim for his poetry. For most of these years he taught Creative Writing at Curtin and Murdoch University in Western Australia. Late in 1997 he moved with his family to Melbourne. In the next years he lectured at Deakin University and finally at the University of Melbourne. In 2008 he resigned from lecturing and has been writing full time.

His writing is distinctive for its metaphoric richness and expansive vision. It is also hugely various from title to title; his creative restlessness extends not only to style but also to conceptual paradigms. Since his first collection, many of his books have depicted imagined worlds or explored conceptually contained sequences - books such as The Projectionist, Sky Poems, The Rome Air Naked, The Well Mouth and Keepers. Keepers is part of a trilogy which will be extended through two more books The Keeper of Fish, and Keeping Carter, books ostensibly written by Alan Fish and MA Carter, respectively. These are heteronyms for Salom's new work.

Philip Salom has performed as a guest poet and lecturer in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Italy, Yugoslavia, Singapore and New Zealand.

Bibliography

Poetry

Novels

Awards and honours

External links

References