State and National Award-winning poet and professional narrator and storyteller, Samuel Wagan Watson has Irish, German, Dutch, and Aboriginal (Munaldjali and Birri Gubba) ancestry. He is the son of prominent Brisbane-based writer and activist Sam Watson. Born in Brisbane Watson spent much of his earlier life on the fringe of the Sunshine Coast, but moved back to Brisbane to start a career.
In 1999, he was the winner of the David Unaipon Award for Emerging Indigenous Writers for his first collection of poetry Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight. Since then he has written: Itinerant Blues (2001), Hotel Bone (2001), The Curse Words (2011), and Smoke Encrypted Whispers which won the 2005 NSW Premier’s Award for the Book of the Year, and the National Kenneth Slessor prize for Poetry. In 2016 the chapbook, Monster’s Ink, was published.
As a contemporary poet and performer Watson has been in demand at major literary festivals and poetry events, including adaptations of his poetry into animation with the support of the Australian Film Commission. In 2005, a short documentary ‘Bound in Bitumen’ was produced and directed by filmmaker Helen Kassila, in which Watson reflected upon the historic divide of Boundary Street, West End, Brisbane in his poem ‘Last Exit to Brisbane’. This short documentary was acclaimed within the arts-festival circuit. Watson has toured as a writer and performer within Australia and overseas, and his writing has been translated into German, Norwegian, and Indonesian. In 2004, mixing his Indigenous culture with his love of Gothic horror, Watson produced and performed an opera ‘Die Dunkle Erde’ (The Dark Earth) with composers William Barton and Stephen Leek, which premiered in Brisbane in 2004 and again in 2005 at the Brisbane Music Festival.
In 2005 Watson was the poet-in-residence for the ABC TV’s ‘Sunday Arts’ and, in 2007 an artist-in-residence for the Indonesian ‘Utan Kayu’ Literary Biennale where his literary work was translated for audiences in Jakarta and central Java. In that same year, Watson first performed as a vocalist with Northern Territory artist and musician Leak Flanagan at the Newcastle National Young Writers’ Festival. Shortly after, Watson was commissioned by the Japanese Aeronautical Exploration Agency to develop haiku for the pleasure of astronauts living and working on the orbiting International Space Platform. More recently, Watson has been a poet-in-residence in the community of Yarrabah in North Queensland, and worked as a writer and script developer for 98.9FM Murri Country radio station in Brisbane.
In 2013, Smoke Encrypted Whispers was set to music by twenty-three Brisbane-based composers.
In between writing and working on community projects, including poetry in the built environment (his poetry adorns the Eleanor Schonell bridge in St Lucia, Queensland), Watson is a regular guest speaker, workshop facilitator and mentor centering around the creative arts.
(Sources: UQP website; Wikipedia website; ABC website; Writers Talk 2008 website; Poetry International Rotterdam website; ABC (German Vampires and The Dreamtime) The Music Show website; Snapshot Interview: Samuel Wagan-Watson, Ainslee Meredith 2012 on-line)
