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Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton, who lives in Melbourne, is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR. She studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University, and was awarded the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Her first poetry collection, Press Release (2007), won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. A second poetry collection followed in 2013: Hotel Hyperion (also Giramondo). Lisa has also written a children’s novel, Cloudland (2008). Her novel The Life of Houses (2015) shared the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for fiction. She is the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.).

Lisa Gorton reviews 'Earth Hour' by David Malouf

March 2014, no. 359 • 25 February 2014
In his poem ‘Early Discoveries’, published in the collection Neighbours in a Thicket (1974), Malouf remembers being a child in the garden with his grandfather: ‘Staked tomato-plants are what / he walks among, the apples of paradise. He is eighty.’ Malouf turns eighty this year, and many of the poems in Earth Hour find their place in a garden, ‘lightly / touching the earth’. ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews 'Edmund Spenser: A life' by Andrew Hadfield

November 2012, no. 346 • 25 October 2012
In 1579, with the publication of The Shepheardes Calendar, Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99) burst onto the English literary scene. From the beginning, he was one of the oddest of great writers. The Calendar was a work of remarkable ambition. Spenser’s unlikely shepherds ‘piped’ poems to each other, using a pseudo-archaic dialect and a variety of elegant verse forms. The nature of Spenser’s tal ... (read more)

The world of William Kentridge

May 2012, no. 341 • 23 April 2012
In 1981, William Kentridge journeyed from apartheid South Africa to the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, renowned for its work in improvisation and physical theatre – theatre that creates itself in play. Though Kentridge would become an artist – working in drawing, printing, animation, film, opera, and sculpture – physical theatre and improvisation come closest to the curious magic of his work ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews 'Andrew Marvell: The chameleon' by Nigel Smith

September 2011, no. 334 • 23 August 2011
In 1629, Charles I of England sent Daniel Nys to Europe to buy art. Along with works by Titian and Rubens, Nys bought Mantegna’s masterpiece, The Triumphs of Caesar (1486–92). This work on nine large panels is at once sombre and full of wonders. Of its time the most accurate representation of Roman customs and costumes, it is also a work in which precision has a strange effect, almost of tende ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews 'Katherine Mansfield: The Story Teller' by Kathleen Jones

February 2011, no. 328 • 01 February 2011
Virginia Woolf’s cook brought the news in January 1923 that Katherine Mansfield had died. Nelly said in her sensational way at breakfast on Friday, ‘Mrs. Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!’ At that, one feels what? A shock of relief? A rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little then, gradually, blankness and disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself f ... (read more)
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