Maria Takolander
Maria Takolander is the author of three books of poetry, The End of the World (Giramondo 2014), which was highly praised in all major Australian forums as well as in the Los Angeles Review of Books; Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009), which was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Judith Wright Calanthe Award; and Narcissism (Whitmore Press 2005). Her poems have appeared in The Best Australian Poems and/or The Best Australian Poetry every year since 2005, and are anthologised in Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (2009), Thirty Australian Poets (2011), the Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (2014), Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016) and its Macedonian translation, and a forthcoming bilingual anthology featuring Australian poetry in Chinese translation. Her poems have also been translated into Spanish and German, as well as being published in the US, the UK, Austria and Colombia. Radio National aired a program about her poetry in 2015, and she has performed her poetry on ABC TV and at various literary festivals, including the 2015 Queensland Poetry Festival and the 2017 International Poetry Festival of Medellín in Colombia. The recipient of two Australia Council grants, Maria is also a prize-winning fiction writer. The Double (and Other Stories) (Text 2013) was a finalist in the Melbourne Prize for Literature and was named a best book of the year in various forums. Maria earns a living teaching Writing and Literature at Deakin University in the regional city of Geelong, Victoria, where she also lives.