Peter Goldsworthy
Peter Goldsworthy divides his time equally between writing and medicine. He has won literary awards across many genres – poetry, the short story, the novel, and in theatre. His most recent book is The Cancer Finishing School (2024).
‘It’s the essence of Bollockshire / you’re after: its secrets, blessings and bounties.’ So Christopher Reid reads from his hilarious poem at the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival.
park and pay ...assuming this isn’t the weekof the Billycock Fair, or Boiled Egg Day,when they elect the Town Fool.From here, it’s a short stepto the Bailiwick Hall Museum and Arts Centre.As you enter, ignore ... (read more)
Restricted to phone consultations due to the Covid lockdown and my chemo-blasted immune system, I rely increasingly on the selfies of body parts that patients text me to help diagnosis. My iPhone library of lumps, bruises, wounds, rashes, boils, red eyes, and even vaginal discharges, grows rapidly, a luminous pathology museum that often reminds me of Dr Azov in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Chil ... (read more)
‘How many times?’ the voice on the other side shouted. ‘How many fucken times? Will youse ever listen?’ The brick wall between the two change-rooms might have been cardboard.
On this side – the visiting team’s side – the boys sucked on their orange quarters, all ears. Dom Russo, the team manager, screwed up his face and glanced towards the wall. ‘He’s taking it a bit seriously, ... (read more)
An immense irony: Noam Chomsky, one of the left-culture heroes of the 1960s and 1970s –one of mine, at any rate – was in fact all along engaged in a white-anting of the sacred central tenet that unites leftish beliefs, the notion we are products (constructs is the more fashionable term) of our culture. And its optimistic sequel: we can therefore be changed, or improved. Gender roles are suppos ... (read more)
i.m. Les Murray 1938–2019, after a line by Frigyes Karinthy
Dear god-herd, golden god-horde, Lord Protectors of the meek and green-fed:when we came in from the coldten thousand winters back, the termsof your contract (unsigned since godswere not yet literate) seemed safely,fashionably fair trade: a shorterfor a sweeter life, a good life spentin clover, free from drought, hungerand the terr ... (read more)
The composer Richard Mills and the poet and novelist Peter Goldsworthy have renewed their collaboration to produce an opera based on the Wreck of the Batavia (Previously, the pair adapted Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll for the opera stage.) The new work will be premiered at the Melbourne State Theatre on May 11, in an Opera Australia production. It depicts the notorious events that ... (read more)
My son Daniel’s African wedding took place in Lancashire – where his new Zambian in-laws live – a few days after the US presidential election. Barack Obama was not on the guest list, but his presence loomed so large that he might have been an extra, virtual, best man.
‘There is a joke in Kenya,’ Joseph Sikabbubba, a psychiatrist who was MC for the day, told me. ‘It is easier for a Lua ... (read more)
I have never met Vivian Smith but respect him awfully. The remarkable thing about his editing of this new anthology of Australian poetry is that his own work is not in it. This is unprecedented among recent anthologies, and may of course be a printing error. Even that excellent poet of Buddhist leanings, Robert Gray, was unable to achieve such perfect nirvana some years back in his Younger Austral ... (read more)
An excuse first. This can only be a magpie’s look at a marriage – between poetry and music – that has a near-infinite history of complex living arrangements, recurrent divorces, remarriages and impromptu de facto cohabitations. I’ve chosen a few marital battles of particular interest to me, a writer for whom song is a sometime thing. I’d like to claim those battles as representative of s ... (read more)