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Michael Farrell Michael Farrell i(A3320 works by) (a.k.a. Michael John Farrell)
Also writes as: 'Dodi ‘Dodo’ Malley' ; 'Bradley Malley-Trushott' ; 'Veronica Malley'
Born: Established: 1965 Bombala, Bombala - Delegate area, Cooma - Snowy - Bombala area, Southeastern NSW, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

Michael Farrell has lived in Sydney and Melbourne, spending much of his childhood on a farm. He has worked as an editorial assistant and poetry reader at Meanjin and as editor of Slope. He has written various performance works, including the play 'Up Here' which was performed at the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 1991 under his direction. Farrell's literary influences include Joyce, Brecht, Stein, ee cummings, and popular culture. His early rural experiences also colour his poetic work.

Farrell co-edited the anthology Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets which was published by Puncher & Wattmann in late 2009.

Farrell has completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne on experimental poetics in the nineteenth century and, in 2013, was a creative fellow at UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Googlecholia Penrith : Giramondo Publishing , 2022 24991962 2022 selected work poetry

'The new poetry collection by Michael Farrell, winner of the Judith Wright Calanthe Award.

'The Judith Wright Calanthe Award is Australia’s most prestigious poetry prize. Its award to Michael Farrell marks him out as one of our most important poets. There is no one like him for his souped-up surrealism, the range of his images, his wit and playfulness, his satirical takes on contemporary life.

'The title of his new collection Googlecholia alludes to the range of emotional affects and feelings that the Internet induces: pleasure, satisfaction, joy, melancholy, anxiety, schadenfreude, boredom, nausea. As a many-armed search engine, Google represents both the boundless realms of the Internet, and the reductive image of knowledge that we hold in our heads. Google presides (alongside Wikipedia) for Farrell, because of the ease of research it enables for poems: whether for a quote, an etymology, or a fact. Here its elements populate and drive the poetic imagination, creating realities in which anything might be related to something else, and the strange, the unsettling and the fantastic are the natural order of things.

'The poems in Googlecholia include ‘French Open’, a portrait of John McEnroe in the midst of a Baudelairean-inflected match; Philip Emu, a rewrite of John Skelton’s Tudor-era ‘Philip Sparrow’; the ABBA-driven prose poem ‘Grammatical Theme and “Dancing Queen”’; ‘“Fire” At The Pointer Sisters Factory’, a David Ireland-style nickname extravaganza (and a Best of Australian Poems 2021 choice); ‘“Cars” Is Feeling Grateful’, a status update via Gary Numan’s 1979 hit of the same name; and ‘Arthur Boyd Has Pink Teeth’, inspired by an early painting of his.' (Publication summary)

2023 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award
2023 longlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
Australianesque i "Peter Porter wrote a sonnet sequence about Christopher Brennan", 2022 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , January–February no. 439 2022; (p. 27) Best of Australian Poems 2022 2022; (p. 12)
2022 shortlisted Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Hamlet In The Mind Of A Country Schoolteacher i "These words were in Adam’s head when he woke up, but", 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Hope for Whole : Poets Speak up to Adani 2018; (p. 18-20)
2017 joint winner Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize
Last amended 15 Nov 2021 11:37:25
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