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Lucy Dougan Lucy Dougan i(A16445 works by)
Born: Established: 1966 Perth, Western Australia, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Lucy Dougan lived in Newcastle, New South Wales for a number of years before returning to Western Australia. Dougan completed a PhD at the University of Western Australia in 2010.

She has been an editor of the literary magazine Heat, and worked for the journals Westerly and Axon, and as a lecturer at Curtin University. In 2018, she was working for the China-Australia Writing Centre at Curtin University.

In addition to her own work (including the collection The Guardians, which won the 2016 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards for poetry), she is also the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (with Tim Dolin).

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon The Guardians Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2015 8597845 2015 selected work poetry

'Many poems in this collection explore the intrusions of 'the wild' into daily life, through memories, in illness, and in places that you've lost or left behind. Dougan is interested in the ways in which the past re-enters the present, particularly through the secrets of family life, in all kinds of atavism, and in pockets of wildness in the suburbs and the city which are a source of liveliness and a dark sort of energy. Her poems feature old houses, ruins, revisited places; they focus on the bonds between the generations, between children and adults, humans and animals, and humans and the physical world. The title of the collection refers broadly to these ties, which impose a sense of guardianship on those who are bound by them. In contrast to the wildness they recognise, the poems themselves seek to tread lightly - they aspire to quietness and reticence, to cumulative rather than immediate effects, and to sustaining a relatively natural and unobtrusive voice.' (Publication summary)

2016 winner Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Poetry
2016 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize for Poetry
2015 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award
y separately published work icon White Clay 2006 Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2008 Z1340361 2006 selected work poetry 'A complex awareness of family life is at the heart of Lucy Dougan's new collection. Its narrative interweavings lead us from the world of books and romance into motherhood and its immersion in the world of children, then summon up, in turn, the poet's own childhood, and its barely recognised estrangements, 'the father that I did not know', and later a whole new family, to be reclaimed as her own. Dougan's poems are alive to the intimations which exist at 'the fugitive border of thought', and celebrate the imagination's power to mould, to recover, and to repair.' (Publisher's blurb)
2006 winner Australian Capital Territory Poetry Prize Alec Bolton Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Australian Poet
y separately published work icon Memory Shell Wollongong : Five Islands Press , 1998 Z428890 1998 selected work poetry
1998 highly commended Anne Elder Award
2000 winner ASAL Awards Mary Gilmore Award for a First Book of Poetry
Last amended 1 Jul 2020 13:54:35
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