A masterful portrait of a major Australian writer, her incandescent poetry and her battles to be heard in a male-dominated literary establishment. Winner of the 2023 National Biography Award The first biography of Gwen Harwood (1920–1995), one of Australia’s most significant and distinctive poets. Harwood is renowned for her brilliance, but loved for her humour, rebellion and mischief. A public figure by the end of her life, she was always deeply protective of her privacy, and even now, some twenty-six years after her death, little is known of the experiences that gave rise to her extraordinary poems. This book follows Harwood from her childhood in 1920s Brisbane to her final years in Hobart in the 1990s. It traces how a lively, sardonic and determined young woman built a career in the conservative 1950s, blasting her way into the patriarchal strongholds of Australian poetry. Harwood refused to be bound by convention, ‘liberating’ herself, to use her word, before women’s lib existed. Yet she also struggled for much of her life to combine marriage and motherhood with her creative ambitions. In this sense, she is a twentieth-century everywoman. She is also a unique and powerful presence in Australian literary history, a poet who challenged orthodoxies and spoke in a remarkable range of voices. This illuminating, moving biography reveals a deeply passionate figure both at odds with her time and deeply of it, and reclaims and celebrates this important Australian writer. ‘Gwen Harwood, that excellent poet and critic, deserves a sympathetic and lively biography. Ann-Marie Priest, to her credit, has just written that book.’ —Ann Blainey, winner of 2009 National Biography Award 'Read this meticulous biography with Harwood's poetry in hand, and chase down every poem that Priest cites.' —The Sydney Morning Herald 'Ann-Marie Priest has captured completely the sprite-like nature of one of Australia's finest poets… Through these pages, the great poet feels so alive.' —Judges comments, National Biography Award

This volume investigates Australian poetry's centrality to debates around colonialism, nationalism, diversity, embodiment, local-global relations, and the environment.

Gwen Harwood is celebrated as one of Australia's greatest poets. This is an all-encompassing collection of a lifetime of writing, including poems published just before her death.

O could one write as one makes love when all is given and nothing kept, then language might put by at last its coy elisions and inept withdrawals, yield, and yielding cast aside like useless clothes the crust of worn and shabby use, and trust its candour to the urgent mind its beauty to the searching tongue. Gwen Harwood's work is defined by a moving sensuality, a twinkling irreverence and a sly wit. This anthology brings together the best 100 of her poems, as selected and compiled by her son, the writer John Harwood. “The outstanding Australian poet of the twentieth century” - Peter Porter “Gwen Harwood’s poetry is widely recognised for its stark intimacy and brilliant resonance” - The Sydney Morning Herald Gwen Harwood, one of Australia’s most celebrated poets and librettists, published over 420 works in her lifetime, many of which continue to be studied widely in schools and universities across Australia. She received numerous awards and prizes, including the Patrick White Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1989. She died in 1995, aged seventy-five.

Gwen Harwood has long been recognised as one of Australia's finest poets and librettists. She had a quicksilver intellect and a rare ability to go directly to the heart of whatever occupied her. Generosity of spirit, biting wit, and a superb command of a language characterise both her poetry and her letters to friends.The letters in this edition - written between 1943 and her death in 1995 - present a strong claim that Gwen Harwood be considered this country's greatest letter-writer. The selection includes less than one-tenth of the letters transcribed by her biographer Gregory Kratzmann. Half of the letters here were written to her good friend Tony Riddell, to whom she dedicated all but the last of her volumes of poetry. Her correspondents include major figures from the fields of literature, art and music in Australia, and her love of letter-writing shows the value she accorded to friendship.

This volume, edited and with invaluable notes by Alison Hoddinott, comprises Gwen Harwood's fascinating, unexpurgated letters to Alison and Bill Hoddinott, during four crucial years, from 1960- 1964, a period which can be described as Harwood's creative floreat. They are also years in which her life-long relationships with A.D. Hope, James McAuley and Vincent Buckley begin, her friendships with Vivian and Sybille Smith and others consolidate, and in which Harwood was briefly notorious for her scandalous Bulletin acrostics and her confounding publication under several male pseudonyms. Approximately 10 percent of these letters have appeared already, in A Steady Storm of Correspondence (2001), but here we not only have the unedited versions, revealing even more than that volume the complex and not always kind and tactful personality of Harwood (who more than once urges the Hoddinotts to 'burn these letters'), but numerous others which it might have been felt unwise to publish earlier, and from which not everyone - even Harwood herself - emerges unscathed. The collection is rich in insights not only into Harwood's mind, working methods, and circle, but also into the literary politics of one of the key periods in modern Australian poetry.

***Highly commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript*** 'I need to be a writer, ' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.' She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans. A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer. They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation-their 'need' to be a writer-that would not let them rest. Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image. *** "Ann-Marie Priest writes with admirable clarity and a strong sense of appreciation for her subjects. A Free Flame weaves fascinating biographical details and critical insights into an examination of the various ways in which these talented artists negotiated the tension between their sense of vocation and the hindering cultural expectations they faced as women." --James Ley, critic and judge of the Dorothy Hewett Award [Subject: Non-Fiction, Biography, Gender Studies]