Robert Gray

Robert Gray was born in 1945; he grew up and was educated in a country town on the north coast of New South Wales. He trained there as a journalist, and since then has worked in Sydney as an editor, advertising copywriter, reviewer and buyer for bookshops. His first book of poems, Creekwater Journal, was published in 1973, and his most recent, Lineations, in 1996.

He has been a writer-in-residence at Meiji University in Tokyo and at several universities in Australia, and has won the Adelaide Arts Festival and the New South Wales and Victorian Premiers' Awards for poetry. In 1990 he received the Patrick White Award. With Geoffrey Lehmann he edited two anthologies, The Younger Australian Poets and Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century, and he is the editor of Selected Poems by Shaw Neilson, and Drawn from Life, the journals of the painter John Olsen. After Images is his latest collection of poetry.

Robert has won two prestigious prizes for in 2002 - The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the Victorian Premiers Prize for Poetry. Both prizes were for afterimages.

1964 wrote the Australian Reader's Digest Book of Do-It-Yourself Home Repairs

1970 Introspect, Retrospect, his first book of poems, published

1974 Creekwater Journal

1979 Grass Script

1984 The Skylight

1985 Selected Poems NSW Premier's Award for Poetry, Adelaide Festival of the Arts Award and Grace Leven Poetry Prize

1988 Piano

1990 receives Patrick White Award

1991 edits, with Geoffrey Lehmann, Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century

1993 Certain Things Victorian Premier's Literary Award

1996 Lineations, poems and drawings

1998 New Selected Poems, the only selection of Gray's previously published poetry in print

2002 After Images, Gray's first work in over seven years, The Age Poetry book of the Year, Victorian Premiers Prize for Poetry