Phil Hammial

Gandy Dancing is Philip Hammial’s thirty-ninth collection of poetry. His sixteenth collection, In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children, was short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize in 2004, as was his fourteenth collection, Bread, in 2001. In 2010 Skin Theory, his twenty-first collection, was short-listed for the ACT Poetry Book Prize. He has represented Australia at fourteen major international poetry festivals: Poetry Africa 2000 & 2016, Durban; The Festival Franco-Anglais de Poesie, Paris, 2000 & 2015; The World Festival of Poets, Tokyo 2000; the Festival Internacional de la Poesie, Trois Rivieres, Canada, 2004 & 2018; the Micro-Festival, Prague, 2009 & 2015; the Festival de Poesia de Medellin, Colombia, 2012; the Festival Internacional de Poesie de Granada, Nicaragua, 2014; the Val-de-Marne International Festival de Poesie, Paris, 2015; the Struga Poetry Evenings, Struga, Republic of Macedonia, 2015 and the Istanbul Literature Festival, 2016. In 2009/10 he was the Australian writer-in-residence for six months at the Cité International des Arts in Paris.

About previous books:
There is an anarchic meditation going on framed within a considered formal order. This is one of the enjoyable and intriguing contradictions that a Hammial poem offers, an imagistic, free flowing stream of consciousness that sometimes seems to surprise the poet too.

— Mark O’Flynn