In the Serious Light of Nothing

Peter Minter is a leading Australian poet, editor and writer on poetics. Born in 1967, he shares Scottish, English and Aboriginal heritage. He grew up first by the ocean and then in the bush, traveled to Japan at the age of eighteen and then studied literature and philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Empty Texas, Morning, Hyphen and blue grass. His work has been published widely and anthologized regularly in Australia and internationally, and he has been awarded numerous fellowships, grants and prizes. Since the mid-1990s he has been a central figure in innovative and avant-garde Australian poetry and poetics.

Apart from curating various renowned poetry events and exhibitions of visual art, music and poetry, he was the founding editor of the Varuna New Poetry broadsheets, the founding co-editor of Cordite, a coeditor of the influential anthology Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, the poetry editor of the leading Australian journal Meanjin, and a co-editor of both the groundbreaking Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature and The Literature of Australia. He recently co-edited the "Ecopoetics and Pedagogies" special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, and is now poetry editor of Australia's foremost radical journal of literature and ideas, Overland. As a poet, theorist and teacher, Minter reconsiders in his works antipodean encounters between poetic language, materialist geophilosophies and the rendering of natural and poetic ecologies.

His recent work has focused especially on an ecopoetical inquiry into Aboriginal conceptions of "Country" and the decolonization of the Australian imagination. He is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, specializing in Australian and Aboriginal poetry, poetics and ecopoetics, and lives in the Blue Mountains with poet, musician and scholar Kate Fagan, and their two children.