Philip Neilsen


Philip Max Neilsen is an Australian poet, fiction writer and editor. He teaches poetry at the University of Queensland and is adjunct professor of creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology.

Biography

Neilsen was born in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. His grandparents and great grandparents were emigrants from Norway, Scotland, England and Germany. He attended Brisbane Grammar School and the University of Queensland where he gained honours, masters and doctoral degrees in English and taught for nine years. He founded the creative writing program at the Queensland University of Technology in 1997. He has been a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. Previously, he has been Chair of the Queensland Writers Centre and Chair of PEN Australia North. Neilsen is married to legal ethicist and novelist Mhairead MacLeod.

Writing and editing

Neilsen’s work ranges from satire and fabulism to lyricism and social realism, and explores social, environmental and personal subjects. Literary influences he has mentioned include W. H. Auden, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, David Malouf, Judith Wright, Elizabeth Bishop and Simon Armitage. His poetry earned a Young Writer’s Fellowship from the Australia Council in 1976. Edward Britton , a young adult novel co-authored with Gary Crew was a CBC Australian Notable Book in 2001. His work has been translated into Chinese, German, Korean and Serbian. His poetry was included in the 2008 Norton anthology The Making of a Sonnet, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, Australian Poetry Since 1788, The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry and The Best Australian Poems 2017
He wrote the first monograph of literary criticism on David Malouf’s work, Imagined Lives and edited the first collections of Australian satirical poetry The Penguin Book of Australian Satirical Verse and The Sting in the Wattle. Neilsen’s poetry has been acclaimed by Les Murray, John Kinsella, Sarah Holland-Batt, Bronwyn Lea, Martin Duwell and Bruce Dawe, among others. His work has been shortlisted for an Aurealis Award, Fair Australia Prize, Woorilla Poetry Prize and the ASAL Gold Medal. He has won prizes in the Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Poetry Award and the MPU International Poetry Competition. His book "Wildlife of Berlin" was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, 2019.
His areas of research include creative writing therapy in the promotion of mental health, eco-criticism and environmental poetry. He currently teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Queensland.

Poetry books

Faces of a Sitting Man.

The Art of Lying

Australian Poets on Tape: Philip Roberts & Philip Neilsen

Life Movies

We’ll All Go Together

Without an Alibi

Wildlife of Berlin

Children’s and young adult books

Emma and the Megahero

The Lie

The Wombat King,

Edward Britton

Splot the Viking

Scholarly Books

Imagined Lives: A Study of David Malouf

The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing Co-edited with David Morley

Creative Arts in Counseling and Mental Health Co-edited with Robert King and Felicity Baker

Edited Anthologies

The Penguin Book of Australian Satirical Verse Edited by Philip Neilsen

The Sting in the Wattle Edited by Philip Neilsen

50 Years of Queensland Poetry Co-edited with Helen Horton

Difficult Love: Short Stories Co-edited with Helen Horton

Short stories

His short stories have appeared in The State of the Art, Paradise to Paranoia, Latitudes, The Dark House and journals such as Southerly, Overland and Linq. The autobiographical essay ‘Humility’ appeared in Eleven Saving Virtues. A digital story ‘The Storyteller’ is available at
http://www.kgurbanvillage.com.au/sharing/digital/philip.shtm