Philip Salom grew up on a dairy farm outside Brunswick Junction, south of Perth, Western Australia. He was educated at Bunbury High School and Muresk Agricultural College and worked at farming and cattle research, then later as a house-painter and gardener. He was a visual artist for several years before taking up further studies at Curtin University (then the Western Australian Institute of Technology). During this time, he began writing poetry.
The recipient of many awards including dual winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in London, he was also the inaugural Resident in the B.R. Whiting Library Apartment in Rome. Besides poetry, Salom has written novels, literary reviews and articles for journals such as Australian Book Review, Overland, Westerly and Voices. He wrote the drama Always Then and Now, which was commissioned by and performed for The Festival of Perth and ABC Radio National.
Before moving to Melbourne, Salom was active for many years in the Western Australian literary scene as a creative writing tutor, a writer-in-residence, and an organiser of literary events. In the late 1990s he created text and image installations at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Mundaring Arts Centre and worked with Meredith Kidby on web-based and other multimedia events. He has been Poetry Editor (Victoria) for the poetry journal Blue Dog and has also judged national poetry awards and served on literary committees, including the 1987 Bicentennial Publications Grants Panel and the Katharine Susannah Prichard Foundation.
Outside Australia, he has been a writer-in-residence at Singapore National University and a guest writer/reader in Yugoslavia, the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy and New Zealand and has featured at such national and international events as the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Melbourne Writers' Festival, the Vancouver Writers' Festival and the Iowa International Writing Program.
He taught at Murdoch, Curtin and Deakin Universities before joining the staff of the School of Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Of his writing, Salom says 'Much of my (recent) work has drawn on studies and research in neurological areas, particularly memory deficit - aphesia, amnesia and dementia... my writing has been exploring and monitoring consciousness and the various constructions, but also deconstructions of it through language - and the relationship between poetry and narrative.'
Source: Research profile, http://www.sca.unimelb.edu.au/staff/index.lasso?-database=Staff.fp3&-layout=www&-response=detail.html&-recordID=18&-search (Sighted 10.7.07, page no longer available)