John A. Scott
John A. Scott is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose. His works have been published in the United States and the United Kingdom and have appeared in French, German, Italian, Slovenian, and Dutch translation. He has received Victorian Premier’s prizes for both poetry (St Clair, 1986) and fiction (What I Have Written, 1994). The film version of What I Have Written, for which he wrote the screenplay, was selected for competition at the 1996 Berlin and Stockholm Film Festivals and was winner of the International Mystery Film Festival in Bologna. The script received an AFI nomination and an AWGIE award for best screenplay adapted from another source. His Selected Poems (1968–90) appeared in 1995. His novel Before I Wake (1996) was shortlisted for the National Book Council Banjo Award, the Miles Franklin Award, and the Victorian Premier’s Prize. His subsequent novel, The Architect, was shortlisted for the 2002 Biennial Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction, and the Miles Franklin Award. Warra Warra, a ‘ghost story’ parable of the white invasion of Australia, was published in 2003. He received a Breaking New Ground award from the Literature Board of the Australia Council in 2008 for the major experimental novel, N, which will appear from Brandl & Schlesinger late in 2013. Scott is currently working on a book-length poem, ‘Rudolph & Miranda’, which resurrects an abandoned project dating from 1967–68. Picaro Press is shortly to publish Early Sonnets, which contains a number of his works from this period. (Photograph by Helen Bethune)