Simon Caterson
Simon Caterson is an Australian writer focusing on literature, art, ideas, history and popular culture for various newspapers and magazines.[1] He was born in Melbourne, Australia where he currently lives, and trained there as a lawyer before traveling to Ireland where he completed a postgraduate degree in Irish literature at Trinity College, Dublin. Subsequently he produced a doctoral thesis on novelist J. G. Farrell and a number of academic articles on Farrell and Francis Stuart in Irish and English journals.
Since the early 1990s when his work began appearing in The Age and The Australian, Caterson has published hundreds of items there and elsewhere, his work comprising essays, features, interviews, reports and reviews. In 2004 he had a six-month stint as a columnist at the Sunday Age.
One of Caterson's essays, 'Building the total university', was selected by Robert Dessaix for the 2005 edition of the Best Australian Essays annual. Caterson wrote introductions to new editions of Australian classics The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Madame Midas, both by Fergus Hume, and The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederick Manning.
Caterson's work is wide-ranging, encompassing Samuel Alexander and The Simpsons. More than once, Caterson has lent support to the movement towards an Australian republic. He has also written at some length, and with ambivalence, on Ned Kelly. His 2000 essay on the writings of notorious ex-criminal and prolific author Chopper Read, which appeared in the Australian Book Review, was described in The Age as "seminal". Other pieces have appeared in publications such as Eureka Street, Meanjin and The Griffith Review
His first book, Hoax Nation: Australian fakes and frauds from Plato to Norma Khouri, a brief history of Australian hoaxes, was published in November 2009 by Arcade.
References
- ↑ Contributors, The Australian (3 June 2009)("SIMON CATERSON writes on literature, art, ideas, history and popular culture for newspapers and magazines.")