Craig Sherborne – August 25 2019

National Jersey Day (organ/tissue donation) – August 30 2019

Craig is a memoirist, novelist, poet and playwright. He has worked as a journalist for country newspapers and the Herald Sun, started a veterinary degree but didn’t like it, and studied method acting during his time in London. His poems and essays have appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies, including Black Inc.’s Best Australian Essays and Best Australian Poems. Craig’s awards include the Wal Cherry Play of the Year Award for his stage play, The Ones Out of Town and the Ian Reed Foundation Award for Radio Writing for his radio play, Table Leg. His memoirs, Hoi Polloi and its sequel, Muck, are envisaged as two in a trilogy. The third, when he writes it, will probably take a profoundly different tone as his parents have since died and the web of tension, love and conflict that dictated the family dynamic has dissolved. Craig’s novels include Tree Palace and Off the Record. His first novel, The Amateur Science of Love, paints the portrait of a mastectomy patient and began as a poem titled ‘Showing’, written in his late 20s after watching his then partner fight breast cancer. It was later published in his first volume of poetry, Bullion. ‘The Ring Cycle’, the story of his mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, was published in The Monthly in 2006.

Look at Everything Twice for Me: A Dramatic Poem [VERSE PLAY]
Currency Press, 1999; ISBN 9780868196008

Heather has been the recipient of a heart transplant and now she has a fierce desire to know the identity of the organ donor. Just when it appears that her quest may be over, an intensely confronting and disturbing scenario presents itself. The play identifies the complex moral and emotional issues of organ transplant in a dramatic, yet compassionate text from a writer capable of merging the poetic with the theatrical.

Necessary Evil
Black Inc., 2005; ISBN 9781921866593
“Originality may not be everything in poetry, but it’s hard enough to find at any moment in literary history. Necessary Evil is a consummate book, and of an instantly insistent originality. With it Sherborne goes to the top of Australian poetry – nobody is writing better.” – Peter Porter
Necessary Evil contains magnificently realistic poems of family, racing and journalism as well as haunting evocations of the bush. Sometimes satirical and sometimes deeply personal, it confirms Sherborne as a poet possessing both verbal brilliance and an unmistakable vision.