MTC Cronin was born in 1963 in Merriwa in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia and grew up in Caloundra, Queensland. She has published numerous collections of poetry as well as several in translation including her 2001 book, Talking to Neruda’s Questions, which has been translated into both Spanish and Italian.
Cronin has studied arts, law, literature and creative writing and after working for the decade of the nineties in law, she began teaching writing in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. She currently lives in Maleny with her partner and three young daughters and has recently completed her doctorate for The Catastrophe of Meaning, which consists of eleven interlinked cross-genre books exploring poetry, law, justice and desire .
Her work has won and been shortlisted for many major literary awards among them the Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize; the Stand International Poetry Prize; the James Joyce Foundation’s Suspended Sentence Award; the John Bray Poetry Award, South Australian Festival Awards for Literature; the Jessie Litchfield Award for Literature; the Judith Wright Calanthe Prize for Poetry, Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards; and the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry. In her native Australia, her 2004 book-length poem, <More or Less Than> 1-100, won the 2005 CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and in 2006 won the Award for Innovation in Writing at the South Australian Festival Awards, as well as being shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Age Book of the Year.
BOOKS OF POETRY:
Zoetrope—we see us moving (Wollongong, Australia: Five Islands Press, 1995); the world beyond the fig (Wollongong, Australia: Five Islands Press, 1998); Everything Holy (Temple, Texas: Balcones International Press, 1998); Mischief-Birds (Sydney, Australia: Vagabond Press, 1999); Bestseller (Sydney, Australia: Vagabond Press, 2001); Talking to Neruda's Questions (Sydney, Australia: Stray Dog Editions, Vagabond Press, 2001) [published in translation as Respondiendo a las Preguntas de Neruda (Santiago, Chile: Safo, 2004 translated by Juan Garrido Salgado] [published in translation as Controcanto—Il Libro Delle Domande di Neruda (Brazzano, Italy: Edizioni Braitan, 2005, Italian/English; translated by Hans Kitzmuller]; My Lover’s Back—79 Love Poems (St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2002); The Confetti Stone and other poems (Warner’s Bay, Australia: Picaro Press, 2003); beautiful, unfinished— PARABLE/SONG-/CANTO/POEM (Cambridge, England: Salt Publishing, 2003); <More or Less Than> 1-100 (Exeter, England: Shearsman Books, 2004); The Ridiculous Shape of Longing (New & Selected Poems) (Skopje, Macedonia: Blesok, 2005) [English/Macedonian, translated by Igor Isakovski)]; The Flower, the Thing (St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2006); Irrigations (of the Human Heart) ~ fictional essays on the poetics of living, art & love (Edmonds, Washington: Ravenna Press, 2006); Our Life is a Box. / Prayers Without a God (Brisbane, Australia/Chang Mai, Thailand: Soi 3, 2007); Notebook of Signs (& 3 Other Small Books) (Exeter, England: Shearsman Books, 2007); How Does a Man Who is Dead Reinvent His Body? The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli [with Peter Boyle] (Exeter, England: Shearsman Books, 2007)
