Barry Hill (Australian writer)


Barry Hill is an Australian historian, poet, journalist and academic.
Hill was born in Melbourne. He studied at the University of Melbourne gaining his Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Education and a Doctor of Philosophy and from there went to London where he gained his Master of Arts degree from the University of London.
Hill has worked in both Melbourne and London. In London he worked for the Times Literary Supplement. Since 1975 Hill has been a full-time writer and is currently Poetry Editor of The Australian newspaper.
Hill is married to Rose Bygrave, a member of the band Goanna.

Stage

He was part of the cast in the first public performance of Kenneth G. Ross's important Australian play Breaker Morant: A Play in Two Acts, presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company at the Athenaeum Theatre, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, on 2 February 1978.

Performance works

Hill has produced performance works for radio, including Desert Canticles that premiered on ABC Radio on 5 February 2001. Hill is quoted as saying the piece was inspired by the following:
"Desert Canticles arises out of a marriage, a decade of travelling, and some years writing the literary biography of T.G.H. Strehlow out of Central Australia. I was writing my own poems out of love and the landscape, while trying to fathom Strehlow's great achievement in Songs of Central Australia. So the notion of translation as a metaphor for relationship – with place, with others, and with songs of different cultures became a natural one upon which to thread a radio work."

Awards