Ken Bolton

Ken Bolton was born in Sydney in 1949. He attended the University of Sydney, graduating with an Honours degree in Fine Arts, and subsequently completed a PhD at the University of Adelaide. Since 1982 Bolton has lived and worked in Adelaide, where he is associated with the Experimental Art Foundation and operates a press, Little Esther Books.

He has retained a strong interest in art history and theory, as well as continental philosophy and experimental literature, and besides poetry has published art and literary criticism. Bolton’s art criticism has appeared in The CAC Broadsheet, Artlink, Otis Rush and, regularly in the early 90s, in The Advertiser, Adelaide publications. And he has published in Photofile,Art and Text, Art Monthly, Meanjin, Agenda and Like and in Eyeline.

Bolton won Melbourne University’s Michel Wesley Wright Poetry Prize for 1990. More usually he is short-listed: Two Poems — A Drawing of the Sky for the 1991 Victorian Premier’s Award, Untimely Meditations for the NSW Premier’s award in 1999. In 2000 he spent six months in Rome, courtesy of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. His most recent full-length collection is Sly Mongoose published by Puncher & Wattmann.