John Tranter - biographical note

A useful background to John Tranter's life and writing is the 30-page interview by John Kinsella, editor of Salt magazine, available free on the Internet from the Electronic Poetry Center site in Buffalo, New York. It features a number of photos, some from the sixties.

You can link to it here: Take me to Buffalo!

John Ernest Tranter was born in Cooma, New South Wales, in 1943. He attended country schools, and took his BA in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He has worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, making many overseas reading tours. He has lived in London (1966-67) and Singapore (1971-72). He now lives in Sydney. He is married, with two adult children.

Publishing: After working as a freelance editor for some years, in 1971 he was sent to Singapore as Senior Education Editor in South-east Asia with Angus & Robertson Publishers for two years. He has kept up an interest in publishing, bringing out four poetry books by young poets in the early 1980s, and doing editorial and reviewing work for numerous literary magazines and journals over the years.

ABC Radio: He returned to Sydney and took up a position in 1973 as Play Reader with the ABC's Radio Drama and Features Department. In 1975 he went to Brisbane for two and a half years as the Queensland radio drama producer, producing more than forty radio plays and bringing full stereo drama production techniques to the Queensland branch, as well as producing one of the ABC's first location stereo radio documentaries, "Sideshow People", about the travelling sideshow workers at the 1976 Brisbane Exhibition.

In 1975 the ABC brought him to Sydney to design a book review radio program with Jan Garrett, who was to be its first presenter. Twenty years and several presenters later, the program they devised, Books and Writing, is still going strong with essentially the same format.

John Tranter, left, circa 1947, with his brother Peter Hellier and sister Barbara Hellier. Photograph copyright © Peter Hellier, 1947, 1998

During 1987 and 1988 John Tranter was asked to take over the ABC Radio National weekly two-hour arts program Radio Helicon. He found a debilitated program with its budget cut in half, and managed in one year to bring it back to its former strength and a full budget. Working with one assistant, he sought out archival material, commissioned other producers to make new programs, produced programs himself, and presented introductions and links on-air.

Other work: SBS Television: 1981-86, casual basis, subeditor of subtitles and narration scripts.

Teaching, casual: Workers Educational Association: creative writing; Sydney College of the Arts: a five-lecture course on writing and the creative imagination; guest lectures and seminars at Macquarie University, Sydney University, Canberra College of Advanced Education, the Australian National University, and the (then) NSW Institute of Technology.

Teaching, contract: 1983 at Canberra CAE teaching audio technology, professional writing and script-writing in the B.Comm degree course; 1982-83 at NSW Institute of Technology teaching radio production and script-writing in the B.Comm degree course; 1983-84 as editor, External Course Development section, NSW Dept. of TAFE.

He compiled a fifty-page Australian poetry feature supplement for the Chicago magazine New American Writing (No.4, 1989). In 1990 he persuaded the Sydney news magazine the Bulletin to re-introduce a regular poetry segment after a twenty-year gap, and acted as their poetry editor until 1993.

He has received several senior fellowships and other grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. In 1981 he was a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University. He has also received a three-year Australian Artists Creative Fellowship, as well as four writer-in-residencies including ten weeks at Rollins College in Florida in 1992.

John Tranter has travelled widely, making reading tours of the USA, England and Europe in 1985, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, and 1997, and presenting papers and readings at many bookstores and at the Academy of American Poets, St Mark's Poetry Project, La Maison des Ecrivains in Paris, New York University, Stanford University, California Institute for the Arts, Wesleyan University, the East-West Centre at the University of Hawaii, Poetry International in London, North London Polytechnic, and the universities of Stockholm, Gothenberg, Aachen, Heidelberg, Wuppertal, Regensberg, Nottingham, Stirling, St Andrews, Loughborough, Exeter, Cambridge and Oxford.

He has published more than a dozen books, which are listed on the book list page.

He has also published widely in British and US literary magazines including the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Grand Street, New American Writing, Conjunctions, Boulevard, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, _PMC_ (Post-Modern Culture, on the Internet), Verse, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and Poetry Review (UK).

He is the editor of the free Internet magazine Jacket, at http://www.jacket.zip.com.au