Award-winning poet Stuart Barnes was born in Hobart, educated at Monash University, Melbourne and lives in Rockhampton, Australia. His second book, Like to the Lark, was published by Upswell Publishing in 2023. 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.
Stuart’s poem ‘Starting and Finishing with a Line from Lisel Mueller’s ‘‘Cicadas’’’ was shortlisted for the 2023 Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award. ‘Sestina after B. Carlisle’ won the 2021/22 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. ‘Sestina: Pain’ was shortlisted for the 2021 ACU Prize for Poetry. ‘Off-world Ghazal’ was shortlisted for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize and set to music by award-winning Australian writer Nigel Featherstone and released by Hell Herons, an Australian spoken-word/music collective. ‘Triolet: Cerberus and Eros’ was nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize. Other poems have been shortlisted for the NWF joanne burns Microlit Award (2020, 2021, 2022), the 2017 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize, the 2017 Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Award and the Newcastle Poetry Prize (2009, 2010). Stuart’s manuscript ‘Blacking out and other poems’ was runner-up in the 2014 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize.
Stuart’s poetry has appeared on goa (Brisbane’s broadcast roadside digital billboard network), been commissioned for Alcatraz, Australian Poetry Journal, Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Manoeuvres, Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours and Peril Magazine as well as Red Room Company (Poetry Object 2019, Poetry Month 2023), and been 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, Meanjin, 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.
Stuart co-judged the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize (2022, 2023), the 2021 Red Room Poetry Fellowship, the 2017 Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the 2014 ACT Writing and Publishing Awards (Poetry Book Category). He guest co-edited issues of Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review 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 Barnes 