Jordie Albiston


Jordie Albiston is a contemporary Australian poet and academic.

Early life

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.

Career

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. 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. Twenty years after its original publication, Hannah Kent featured Botany Bay Document in her essay "Australia in Three Books".
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. 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.
indness is a hand-bound limited edition artist's book, with etchings by Sheree Kinlyside in response to one poem.
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 is a book-length poem comprising decasyllabic cinquains. Albiston has or had dogs with these names 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". 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". This title was subsequently nominated in Australian Book Review 2018 Books of the Year.
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. Critical analyses of her work can be found in publications such as Axon; Biography ; Feeding the Ghost: Criticism on Contemporary Australian Poetry; Truth and Beauty: Verse Biography in Canada, Australia and New Zealand ; and Westerly. She is referred to as a major Australian poet in Australian Book Review.
Other composers having set Albiston's poetry to music include , Leonard Lehrman, Barry McKimm, Raffaele Marcellino, Rachel Merton, Peter Skoggard and Kezia Yap. 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 and Verity La . She received the Patrick White Literary Award in 2019 for her "outstanding contribution to Australian literature".
Jordie Albiston cannot be found on Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites.

Genre

Structuralist; Mathematics; Documentary

Awards and Nominations