Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon is a Melbourne poet, novelist, critic, librettist, and arts editor of The Saturday Paper. Her operas include The Riders (with Iain Grandage), voted Vocal/Choral Work of the Year in the 2015 Arts Music Awards, and Mayakovsky (with Michael Smetanin), which was shortlisted for the drama prize in the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. Her poetry has been shortlisted for two Premier's Literary Awards and won the Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore Prizes. As a critic, she has written for the ABC, the Australian, the Guardian and others, and kept the well-regarded blog Theatre Notes between 2004 and 2012. She won the 2009 Pascall Prize for Critical Writing. Her most recent novels are The River and the Book (Walker Books 2015) and The Bone Queen (Penguin Books 2016). In 2016 she was awarded an Australia Council Creative Fellowship. Her translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Newport Street Books) was published in 2022.

Alison Croggon reviews 'Rilke: The last inward man' by Lesley Chamberlain

December 2022, no. 449 • 25 November 2022

Since his death in 1926, almost a century ago, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke has remained an anomaly. He was doomed, Lesley Chamberlain says in Rilke: The last inward man, to be a poet ‘in between’: a bridge between modernism and Romanticism, his work an inevitably compromised attempt to reclaim the consolations of metaphysics for a secular age. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – Rilk ... (read more)

Miss Julie (Melbourne Theatre Company)

ABR Arts • 26 April 2016

Strindberg. How do you solve a problem like August? In his own time he was considered extreme. When Strindberg (1849–1912) gave Miss Julie to his publisher, Joseph Seligmann, in 1888, Seligmann insisted it be cut to make it more palatable for the Swedish public. The play wasn't published uncensored until 1984. In the nineteenth century, Miss Julie, a chamber play in which the daughter of an aris ... (read more)

Perth International Arts Festival 2016

ABR Arts • 19 February 2016

As a not-quite-indefatigable cultural itinerant, my memories of Perth are all of festival time. Usually, my arrival is the signal for the temperature to leap into the mid-forties, imbuing the experience with a patina of sweat and a dose of climatic paranoia. PIAF 2016, artistic director Wendy Martin's first festival, was merciful: I flew in just as a record-breaking heatwave came to an end. In ot ... (read more)