Jennifer Harrison is astonishing. She comes from a place that was previously unknown. - Alan Loney
Jennifer
Harrison was
born in
Liverpool, Sydney, in 1955, in a motorbike shop. She completed a
medical degree in 1979 and her training as a psychiatrist in 1990. She
runs the Developmental Assessment Program for children and adolescents
at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne.
She
began writing poetry while living in Boston, USA. Jennifer’s
poetry has won many prizes including the 2003
NSW Women Writers National Poetry Prize, the 2004 Martha Richardson
Poetry Medal and the 2004 Australian
Book Review Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Best Australian Poetry
2003, The
Best Australian
Poems 2004 and will feature in The
Best
Australian Poetry 2005.
Her
first collection Michelangelo’s
Prisoners
won the 1995 Anne Elder Award
and was commended in the Banjo Awards of the same year. Her second
collection Cabramatta/Cudmirrah,
clear-eyed, celebratory, sharp and
elegaic, explores her urban youth and the familiar coast of childhood
and family. Dear
B was her
third collection. She has lived in the United States and New Zealand
and has
travelled in the Himalayas.
She
lives with her family in Melbourne where she practises as a
psychiatrist. As a poet successive reviewers in Australian Book Review
have
compared her to Gwen Harwood, Judith Wright and Elizabeth Bishop. As
Alan Gould has written, her poems are ‘deeply attentive to
the
strangeness they have found in the world’.
Jennifer’s photographs have been exhibited in the Reveries
Gallery in
Bendigo and her poems in the National Gallery of Victoria.
Jennifer rows with the Dragons Abreast dragon boat racing team and
loves being out on the Yarra River in the Melbourne evenings. The
rhythms of dragon boat drumming combined with the homely stare of the
dragon across the water pretty much sum up her poetic aspirations.
Black Pepper published Harrison’s
latest collection of poems, Folly & Grief,
in 2006. She co-edited (with Kate Waterhouse)
Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (Puncher and Wattmann, 2009). Her forthcoming book, to be published by Black Pepper, will be
Columbine; New & Selected Poems.
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Biography