Joanna Preston

Websitehttps://joannapreston.com

Joanna Preston is an Australian-born poet, editor, creative writing teacher and publisher, who lives in rural Canterbury, New Zealand. Her first collection, The Summer King (Otago University Press, 2009) won both the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry (2008) and the 2010 Mary Gilmore Prize.Her second collection, tumble (Otago University Press, 2021) won the Mary & Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2022 New Zealand Book Awards. She has an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan (Wales), and runs poetry courses as The Poetry Class.

In a previous life, she won the 1988 Winton to Longreach Stockman’s Hall of Fame Endurance Ride. In this one, she’s a chicken-keeper with a very wild garden.

Genre:

  • Poetry

Skills:

  • Competition Judging
  • Editing
  • Mentoring
  • Poetry Readings
  • Public Speaking
  • Readings (adults)
  • Workshops (adults)

Branch:

Canterbury

Location:

Southbridge

Publications:

The Summer King

The Summer King tells stories, exploring the world we inhabit and our relationships with the other. Myth, catastrophe, family, strangers, sex, sport – all feature in this ‘fine and fierce first collection’ (Gillian Clark). The book contains two sequences: ‘Cowarral’, about Preston’s family farm in the Forbes Valley of NSW, and ‘Venery’, which was inspired by the collective nouns that first appeared in the Book of St Albans.The collection won both the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry (2008), and the 2010 Mary Gilmore Award for the Best First Poetry Collection by an Australian author.

‘Joanna Preston writes a poised and sensual poetry, with unsettling energies always threatening to break through the surface.’ (Philip Gross)

From the Mary Gilmore judge's report: 'Joanna Preston’s title poem, the first in the book, jolts the reader with its imaginativeness and dramatic power, and these qualities are apparent in all the poems that follow. A strong grasp of the actual underlies imaginative representations of both the natural world and the humanly made, generating a dramatic intensity, even in the quieter poems. This is a book of succinct, taut writing that displays a depth of imaginative thought.'