Jordie
Albiston

Jordie Albiston has published fifteen poetry collections, and a handbook on poetic form. Two of her collections have been adapted for music-theatre—Botany Bay Document and The Hanging of Jean Lee—both enjoying seasons at the Sydney Opera House and released on CD.

Over the last twenty-five years, Albiston's work has been recognised by many prizes including the Mary Gilmore Award, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the NSW Premier's Prize and the Patrick White Literary Award for her contribution to Australian literature. Her latest titles are element: the atomic weight & radius of love (Puncher & Wattmann 2019) and a collection of 15-line sonnets Fifteeners (Puncher & Wattmann 2021).

Albiston works within formal boundaries: traditional, experimental, or self-imposed. She seeks the musical cadence while endeavouring to exact a mathematical sense of existence. Often she utilises archival sources from which to wrest a kind of documentary cataloguing; other times she refers to an internal witness of experience. Her poetics are highly charged with vertigo, and doubt.

Albiston has an entry in Who's Who in Twentieth-Century World Poetry, and is mentioned in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics.

​

She lives in Melbourne.