Tim Thorne – August 27 2017

International Overdose Awareness Day (Penington Institute) – August 31 2017

Aims to raise awareness of overdose and reduce the stigma of a drug-related death.

Tim has written 14 poetry collections, edited four anthologies and had his poems published in most major Australian literary journals. He has held numerous writer-in-residence posts, worked as a poet in schools, universities and prisons, and has read at Australian and international literary festivals. After studying at the University of Tasmania, Tim moved to Sydney and became associated with the Generation of ’68 poets. He later won a writing scholarship to Stanford University, one of the many prizes, grants and fellowships he has received. After moving back to Launceston, Tim established Cornford Press, to promote the work of Tasmanian poets, and inaugurated the Tasmanian Poetry Festival which incorporates his invention, the Launceston Poetry Cup, a performance poetry concept now imitated Australia- and world-wide. Tim was the only Australian contributor to the “DJ Donny Johnny” project in which 16 poets contributed a canto each to an updated version of Byron’s Don Juan, published in 2014 as A Modern Don Juan: Cantos for These Times. His roles as National Secretary of DADAA (Disability and the Arts, Disadvantage and the Arts Australia) and writer/co-ordinator for a national project for writers with cerebral palsy, conducted through Arts ‘R’ Access, reflect his interest in creating opportunities for poets and other artists with disabilities.

Yeah No
Press Press, 2012; ISBN 9780987305701
Having been at the forefront of poetry in Australia since the 1960s, Yeah No is Tim’s thirteenth collection. It includes poems which illustrate his concerns with social and environmental issues, with history and with some of the absurdities of 21st century society. Some of these pieces are set in Europe, which he visits regularly, and some in Australia, but all belong firmly in the borderless republic of poetry. His trademark wit is present as ever, and his tendency to approach subjects from unexpected angles gives a freshness and clarity to the perceptions which enliven the work. Thorne’s is a distinctive and unforgettable voice.

I Con: New and Selected Poems
Salt Publishing, 2008; ISBN 9781844713370
From early pieces such as ‘Star’ and ‘Launceston’ with their often raw and violent imagery, through to his recent A Letter to Egon Kisch, a major contribution to the epistolary poetic canon in the tradition of Byron and Auden, a selection of dramatic monologues from The Streets Aren’t For Dreamers and a number of pieces based on Australian history and paintings, this volume also contains previously unpublished works such as his series ‘Trainstations from European Poets’, deliberate mistranslations of well-known anthology pieces which are not just fun, but contain new insights into old favourites. Deeply personal poems about the death of his mother, about the father he never knew, about his baby daughter and about a friend dying of a heroin overdose avoid sentimentality and forge tough art out of delicate subjects. They sit at perfect ease alongside meditations on Antarctic exploration, on the meeting of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and on the Iraq War.