Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Christopher Wallace-Crabbe was born in the inner suburb of Richmond in 1934. After several downtown jobs, Wallace-Crabbe became Melbourne University's Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing from 1961 to 1963. Over the next decades he became Reader in English before being promoted to a Personal Chair in 1988. He was Harkness Fellow at Yale University 1965-7, Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard, 1987-8, and visiting Professor at the University of Venice, 1973 and 2005. In 2011 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia.
Wallace-Crabbe began publishing poetry while still an undergraduate, with his slim volume, No Glass Houses, appearing in 1955. He has gone on to publish many volumes, attracting a number of prizes, including the Grace Leven Poetry Prize in 1985 for The Amorous Cannibal, and the Dublin Prize in 1987. His Selected Poems: 1956-1994 won both the Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize and the Age Book of the Year Award for poetry in 1995. Frequently set in Melbourne and widely varied in tone, his poems range from the political to the personal. Wallace-Crabbe has also edited many anthologies and collections of essays and published a number of collections of his literary criticism and essays. In 1981 he also published a novel, Splinters. His latest book is My Feet Are Hungry (Pitt Street Poets).