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Adam Aitken Adam Aitken i(A6079 works by) (a.k.a. Adam Alexander Patrick Aitken)
Born: Established: 1960 London,
c
England,
c
c
United Kingdom (UK),
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Western Europe, Europe,
;
Gender: Male
Arrived in Australia: 1969
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BiographyHistory

Adam Aitken's childhood was spent in Thailand and Malaysia as the son of a Thai mother and an Anglo-Australian father. After graduating from Sydney University in 1982, he co-edited the garage literary journal P76, then returned to Thailand with the intention of immersing himself in the culture and language of his relatives. This experience resulted in the collection of poetry Letter To Marco Polo (1985). He has also reviewed literary works and frequently performed his work at festivals in Australia and overseas. He joined the Poet's Union in 1985 and also served as associate poetry editor for Heat. His work was read on Radio 2RSR in 1984 and he read at the Adelaide Writers Festival in 1982 and at 'Writers in the Park', Harold Park Hotel, Sydney, in 1986.

Aitken was the recipient of a Varuna Writers Residency in 1995 and his second poetry collection, In One House, was chosen three times as Best Book of 1996 in the review pages of The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was also a recipient of an Asialink writers residency for Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia (1998). For five weeks in 1999 Aitken was Visiting Scholar and Creative Writing Tutor in poetry and poetics in the Department of English and European Languages, University of Tasmania. Aitken's poetry and short fiction have been published widely in anthologies and literary journals.

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • Author writes in these languages: ENGLISH

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Revenants Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2022 23614295 2022 selected work poetry

'The title of this collection, Revenants, suggests spirits and ghosts who return to the human world through dream and art, not to haunt it, but to remind the living that the present and the past are intertwined. At the heart of the collection is a series of poems about the poet's father, a Melbournian who travelled and worked in Asia as a young man, who married the poet's mother in Bangkok, and whose life and death are commemorated here. The poems have settings in Asia, Australia, Hawai'i, and France, which has become the author's second home. They reflect on the legacy of colonialism, not as theory, but as inherited experience. In them the poet himself may be thought of as a revenant, sharing his awareness of secret histories and local knowledge, stories of migration, the vestiges of forgotten people and places.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2023 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
y separately published work icon Archipelago Newtown : Vagabond Press , 2017 11681408 2017 selected work poetry

'His most personal poetry to date, Adam Aitken's Archipelago is entirely preoccupied with the experience of living and marrying in France. Much of it written while resident at the Keesing Studio in Paris, and then in the south during a seriously cold spring, many of the poems deal with art, Romantic and Modernist writing and writers, and concepts of nostalgia, spirituality, revolution and resistance. One key question is what France (and Europe generally) mean to an Australian writer, which leads the poet to consider the 'French inspired' work of other Australian writers. At a simpler level, the collection attempts to weigh cosmopolitan culture against that of its fictive alternative: semi-rural France, where the poet asks how we might reconcile isolation with social engagement, conservative values with more outward looking perspectives? Adopting the lens of those who live there, Aitken reflects on the region's Gallo-Roman history, its myths, its communal virtues and constraints, its weather, and on the threats to its ecology.' (Publication summary)

2018 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Poetry
2018 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
y separately published work icon One Hundred Letters Home 100 Letters Home Sydney : Vagabond Press , 2016 9606183 2016 single work biography

When Adam Aitkens parents first met his father, a white Australian, had been posted to Bangkok by the advertising company her worked for. Aitken's mother was a university graduate from southern Thailand. In his quest to understand the people they were - from before he was born through to their eventual separation - Aitkens explores letters and photographs dating back more than 50 years. One Hundred Letters Home is also an account of his attempt to search for his Thai identity during a visit to the country in his early-twenties.

"Adam Aitken’s evocative memoir probes the reasons his father married his mother, an ‘Asian woman’, by researching family history, experimenting with Plots A, B, and C, and intertextual references to Christopher Koch’s 1995 novel Highways to a War, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and Marcel Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’ translated into Thai by his uncle. He tests the construction of his hybridity, the notion of his Asian ‘face’ and where it might be welcome, and where and with whom a trans-Asian citizen belongs' (Gay Lynch, Transnational Literature (ctd. Vagabond Press).

2017 longlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
Last amended 12 Feb 2015 17:28:16
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