Barry Hill

Barry Hill has won Premier’s Awards for poetry, non-fiction, and the essay. He has been writing full-time since 1976, when Penguin published his first book, The Schools. Prior to that he worked as a educational psychologist and journalist in Melbourne and London. His short fiction was widely anthologised. In recent years he has been writing history and fiction. For fifteen years he was Radio Critic for The Age; for ten years the Poetry Editor for The Australian. He is possibly best known for his two major works, Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal possession, and Peacemongers, a study of Rabindranath Tagore and the history of bombing. Recent works include Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems and Reason and Lovelessness: Essays, 1980–2017.

Barry Hill reviews 'Travels with a Writing Brush: Classical Japanese travel writing from the Manyōshū to Bashō' edited and translated by Meredith McKinney

January–February 2020, no. 418 • 16 December 2019

Meredith McKinney, our pre-eminent translator of Japanese classics – among them Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, the poetry of Saigyō Hōshi, the memoirs Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkō, and Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki (Record of the Ten Foot Square Hut) – has delivered another marvel of absorbing, elegant scholarship. Travels with a Writing Brush crosses the country of old Japan, fro ... (read more)

Barry Hill reviews 'Kokoro' by Natsume Soseki, translated by Meredith McKinney

October 2011, no. 335 • 27 September 2011

Australia is supposed to have a knowing relationship with East Asia, but the embarrassing truth we keep under wraps is that you can count on one hand the number of first-class translators we have produced. There are no doubt complex cultural reasons for this, but it is hard to escape the impression that many academics teaching Chinese and Japanese have not been earning their keep. ... (read more)