Jordie Albiston

Jordie Albiston c.1970

Jordie Albiston grew up in Melbourne, one of three or four children. She studied music at the Victorian College of the Arts before completing a doctorate in History or Sociolinguistics .

Albiston's first collection of poems, Nervous Arcs, won the Mary Gilmore Award, received runner-up in the Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Prize. Her next two books were documentary collections, respectively concerning the first European women in the Port Jackson and Botany Bay settlements; and Jean Lee, the last woman hanged in Australia.

Botany Bay Document was later transformed into a performance work entitled Dreaming Transportation by Andrée Greenwell.[1] In 2003, the performance premiered at the Sydney Festival, and in 2004 was staged again at the Sydney Opera House featuring Deborah Conway. The ABC RN studio production of this work won the Grand Prix Marulic (Croatia). Twenty years after its original publication, Hannah Kent featured Botany Bay Document in her essay "Australia in Three Books" (Meanjin 2016).

In 2006, Albiston's biographical verse The Hanging of Jean Lee was used as the text for an opera created by Andrée Greenwell. Featuring Max Sharam, it was first staged at the Sydney Opera House, The Studio.[2] The libretto of this work was subsequently shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Prize for Best Music Theatre Script, and the opera was remounted in Melbourne in 2013.

Albiston's fourth book, The Fall, a collection of chained verse, was shortlisted for Premier's Prizes in Victoria, NSW, and Queensland. This was followed by Vertigo: a cantata, which utilises musical structures and devices in place of traditional organisational techniques and punctuation.

Albiston's sixth collection, the sonnet according to 'm', won the 2010 NSW Premier's Prize, and received runner-up in the Chief Minister's Award (ACT).

[K]indness is a hand-bound limited edition artist's book, with etchings by Sheree Kinlyside [3] in response to one poem.

[T]he Book of Ethel consists of 'perfect square' syllabic rhymed stanzas, charting the life of Albiston's Cornish great grandmother, and XIII Poems brings together commissioned poems written between 2009 and 2013.

Jack & Mollie (& Her) is a book-length poem comprising decasyllabic cinquains. Albiston has or had dogs with these names[4] so it is likely the narrative is autobiographical. This title was twice nominated in Australian Book Review 2016 Books of the Year.

Euclid's dog: 100 algorithmic poems uses various mathematical concepts and proofs as bases for its eight poetic forms. "This is not a book of high mathematics: rather an attempt to migrate some of the innate robustness, austerity and elegance of Euclidean thought into the realm of poetic structure".[5] Euclid's dog was nominated in Australian Book Review 2017 Books of the Year, and shortlisted for the Queensland and NSW Premiers' Prizes in 2018.

A collection of found poems based on the letters and postcards from WWI Victorian soldiers, Warlines was written on a State Library of Victoria Fellowship. In Australian Book Review, David McCooey refers to this work as a masterpiece. "Albiston reworks her source material into highly formal and stylised linguistic works. Warlines is – like her other collections – a technical tour de force".[6] This title was subsequently nominated in Australian Book Review 2018 Books of the Year.

[E]lement: the atomic weight & radius of love extends Albiston's longstanding conversation with mathematics and poetic form into the realm of science. These love poems are structured according to numerical facets of atomic theory, while embracing various historical aspects, anecdotes and fancies associated with the 70 or so elements included here. "Using chemistry as a trope, Albiston tabulates the human predicament of love: its foundations and fundamentals; its configuration of emotions; its recurring properties; and its assumption of elements yet to be defined."

Albiston's work is well represented in anthologies and has been translated into a number of languages. She has an entry in Who's Who in Twentieth-Century World Poetry, and is mentioned in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th ed.). Critical analyses of her work can be found in publications such as Axon; Biography (USA); Feeding the Ghost: Criticism on Contemporary Australian Poetry; Truth and Beauty: Verse Biography in Canada, Australia and New Zealand (NZ); and Westerly. She is referred to as a major Australian poet in Australian Book Review.[7]

Other composers having set Albiston's poetry to music include Andrew Ford (NSW), Leonard Lehrman (New York), Barry McKimm (Melbourne), Raffaele Marcellino (Sydney), Rachel Merton (Brisbane), Peter Skoggard (Canada) and Kezia Yap (NSW). Albiston was selected by The Age for its annual Top 100 list of "Melbourne's most influential, inspirational and creative people" in 2010, and is featured on podcasts on ABC Radio National (A Pod of Poets, 2008) and Verity La [8] (2019). She received the Patrick White Literary Award in 2019 for her "outstanding contribution to Australian literature" (Perpetual Trustees).[9]

Jordie Albiston cannot be found on Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites.

Structuralist; Mathematics; Documentary

• 1991 – winner Convocation Prize (La Trobe University, Melbourne)
• 1991 – joint winner Wesley Michel Wright Award
• 1992 – winner David Myers University Medal (La Trobe University, Melbourne)
• 1994 – highly commended Queensland Premier's Poetry Award for Botany Bay Document (a selection)
• 1996 – winner Mary Gilmore Award for Nervous Arcs[10]
• 1996 – runner-up FAW Anne Elder Award for Nervous Arcs
• 1996 – shortlisted NSW Premier's Literary Award, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for Nervous Arcs
• 1997 – recipient D.J. (Dinny) O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship (University of Melbourne) [11]
• 1999 – runner-up Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize for 'The Fall'
• 2003 – winner MusicOz Best Classical Composition for 'Dreaming Transportation'; composer Andrée Greenwell
• 2003 – shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Award, C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry for The Fall
• 2003 – shortlisted Queensland Premier's Literary Award, Judith Wright Calanthe Prize for Poetry for The Fall
• 2004 – winner Poem of the Millennium (Melbourne Poets Union) for 'Numbers of Reasons to be Grateful'
• 2004 – shortlisted NSW Premier's Literary Award, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for The Fall
• 2004 – winner Grand Prix Marulic, Croatia, for CD Dreaming Transportation; composer Andrée Greenwell
• 2008 – shortlisted Victorian Premier's Prize for Best Music Theatre Script for The Hanging of Jean Lee; composer Andrée Greenwell
• 2010 – winner NSW Premier's Literary Award, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for the sonnet according to 'm'
• 2010 – runner-up Chief Minister's Award (ACT) for the sonnet according to 'm'
• 2011 – writer-in-residence, Cornwall, UK (Hypatia Trust)
• 2013 – winner National Fine Music FM Young Composers Award for 'A Brief History of Love'; composer Rachel Merton
• 2016 – recipient WWI Centenary Fellowship (State Library of Victoria)
• 2016 – shortlisted Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize for 'Boy'
• 2017 – shortlisted Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Euclid's dog
• 2018 – shortlisted NSW Premier's Literary Award, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for Euclid's dog
• 2019 – winner Patrick White Award for contribution to Australian literature[12]
• 2020 – shortlisted Association for the Study of Australian Literature Gold Medal for element: the atomic weight & radius of love[13]

• Interview by Kate Middleton
• Interview by Joan Fleming
• Short interview by Anne Tran

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jordie Albiston.

• Six Villain-elles at softblow.org
• Soul vs Body a poem
• Things to do (Heart)
• The Hanging of Jean Lee - ABC Radio National Poetica's sound version of Andrée Greenwell's composed work in full, with libretto by Jordie Albiston