Nandi Chinna – January 27 2019

World Wetlands Day – February 2

Nandi is an essayist, editor and award-winning poet. She has worked as a gardener, farmer, teacher, journalist, actor and disability support worker. She is currently a researcher at Edith Cowan University. Nandi holds a Bachelor of Arts, Media Studies; Graduate Diploma of Education; Master of Arts, Creative Arts and Doctor of Philosophy, Creative Arts. She was awarded a 2018 Varuna residential fellowship  for An Older Country, a poetry manuscript exploring themes of place, land, activism, ageing and death, and was joint winner of the 2010 Picaro Press Byron Bay Writers Festival Poetry Prize for her poetry chapbook How to Measure Land. Nandi’s poetry has been broadcast on radio and published in national and international journals and anthologies. Her short stories Ralph and Ink Stained Fingers were performed in London as part of the web based installation ‘1001 Nights’ by performance artist Barbara Campbell. In addition to her individual works, Nandi has collaborated with many other artists including musician Danna Checksfield on the poetry performance ‘Speaking in Strings’, illustrator Andrea Smith on the art text project ‘Alluvium’ and Nein Schwarz, Danna Checksfield and Michael Wingate on the sculptural collaboration ‘In Conversation’.

Swamp: Walking the Wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain
Fremantle Press, 2014; ISBN 9781922089489
Chinna uncovers the lost places that exist beneath the townscape of Perth. For the last four years the poet has walked the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain – and she has walked the paths and streets where the wetlands once were. Chinna writes with great poignancy and beauty of our inability to return, and the ways in which we can use the dual practice of writing and walking to reclaim what we have lost. Her poems speak with urgency about wetlands that are under threat from development today.
‘I found reading this sequence of poems moving, exciting, engaging, often sad and melancholic. It left me wanting to know more.’ Susan Hawthorne, James Cook University

Our Only Guide is Our Homesickness
Five Islands Press, 2007; ISBN 9780734037459
‘Nandi Chinna – a South Australian whom the Perth poetry scene has gladly adopted as one of their own – writes verse which is fragile, honest and succinct in its sincerity. Her debut collection Our Only Guide Is Our Homesickness creates a rich, beautifully detailed landscape of the human heart, as burnt and brave as the Australian Outback and as equally vast and fearsome …. She creates a geography of the psyche where science and nature fall in love, consummate, conflict, consort then contort each other …. With this book Chinna has set in motion, with clarity and courage, a career which adheres to the integrity of poetic form and expression.’ Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Out in Perth