About

Award-winning poet Stuart Barnes was born in Tasmania, educated at Monash University, Victoria and lives in Queensland, Australia. His first book, Glasshouses (UQP, 2016), won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize, was commended for the 2016 FAW Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 ASAL Mary Gilmore Award. His second book, Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023), won the 2023 Wesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry, was long-listed for the 2024 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and highly commended in the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.

Stuart’s poems have been awarded the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for the ACU Prize for Poetry, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award, the Blake Poetry Prize, the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the NFW joanne burns Microlit Award, the Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Award and the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize. Other poems have appeared on goa, been commissioned for Alcatraz, Australian Poetry Journal, Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers, Flying Arts Queensland, Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours, Peril Magazine and Red Room Poetry and widely published in anthologies and journals, including in Admissions: Voices within Mental Health, The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Australian Book Review, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Cordite Poetry Review, Griffith Review, Island Magazine, The Language in My Tongue: An Anthology of Australian and New Zealand Prose Poetry, Magma Poetry, Meanjin, Modron Magazine, The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2020, The Moth Magazine, Overland Journal, Plumwood Mountain, POETRY (Chicago), Poetry Wales, Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry, Southerly Journal, Westerly Magazine and The Weekend Australian Review.

Stuart has performed his poetry at Brisbane Writers Festival, Perth Festival Writers Week and Queensland Poetry Festival. He has co-judged the ACT Writing and Publishing Awards (Poetry Book Category), the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Red Room Poetry Fellowship. He has guest co-edited issues of Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Plumwood Mountain Journal and Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry. From 2017–2019 he was a program adviser for Queensland Poetry Festival and from 2013–2017 he was poetry editor of Tincture Journal.

Stuart, Nigel Featherstone, Melinda Smith and CJ Bowerbird are Hell Herons, a spoken-work/music collective whose first record, The Wreck Event, is out in June 2024.