Peter Kocan – October 9 2016

World Mental Health Day – October 10 2016

Peter is a poet, novelist and dramatist. Having left school at 14 to work as a labourer, station-hand and factory-hand, he now holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons), master’s degree, and doctorate in Creative Arts. Peter’s first two poetry books, Ceremonies for the Lost and The Other Side of the Fence, were published while he was serving part of a life sentence at Morisset hospital for the Criminally Insane for his assassination attempt on federal opposition leader Arthur Calwell. After his release on license in 1976, Peter dedicated himself to teaching, acting, and writing drama, poetry, and fiction. His later poetry collections include Armistice, Freedom to Breathe, Standing With Friends and Primary loyalties: poems of politics and society, a joint collection with Hal Colebatch and Andrew Lansdown. His novels include Fresh Fields, a fictionalised account of his youth, and The Fable of All Our Lives. One of his plays, Home Fires Burning, was broadcast on ABC National Radio. Peter has won the prestigious Mattara Poetry Prize and the New South Wales Premier’s Award for Fiction.  In 2010 he won the Australia Council’s Writer’s Emeritus Award for his “exceptional contribution to Australian writing”.

Fighting in the Shade
Hale & Iremonger, 2000; ISBN 9780868066899
Peter Kocan’s Fighting in the Shade sublimates fierce political outrage and searing societal insights into light, barbed, satiric verse. Clear-eyed, measured and ruthless, Kocan reveals the banal forces of everyday evil that are lined up against each one of us. Imbued with a deep sense of the tragic drift of history, Fighting in the Shade bravely and with wit and irony reminds the reader that much of human life is a fight against the odds. Kocan’s declared ambition is to produce work which will help the reader to “enjoy or endure” life better. Fighting in the Shade, his fifth book of poetry, accomplishes this with humour and perception.

The Treatment: And, The Cure: A Novel
Taplinger Publishing Company Inc, 1985; ISBN 9780800878672
Len Tarbutt is serving a life sentence for attempted homicide. After a brief period in gaol, he is transferred to the maximum-security ward of a mental hospital, where moments of absurdity and anarchy will remind readers of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But The Treatment and its award-winning sequel, The Cure, form a single story that pulses with darker and more disquieting undertones. It is a compelling, disturbing, and often humorous account of one man’s fight to survive incarceration.