2014

Iman Budhi Santosa

Iman Budhi Santosa, an Indonesian poet published by Flying Island in 2015, passed away in December 2020. He had dedicated his life to mentor countless creative writers and poets in Yogyakarta, Indonesia since 1969. Iman is known as one of the street poets in Yogyakarta, actively writing poems and plays even in the three-year period when he was homeless and lived in the streets. His poems, both in Indonesian and Javanese, generally revolves around Javanese culture and urban life.

Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iman_Budhi_Santosa

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Faces of Java / Wajah-wajah Jawa

Kit Kelen and Chrysogynus Siddha Malilang translators

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Philip Salom

Philip Salom is a contemporary Australian poet and novelist whose books have attracted widespread acclaim. He has published nineteen books – fourteen collections of poetry and five novels – notable for their originality and expansiveness and for surprising differences from title to title.

Philip Salom has won the Outstanding Achievement Award of the 4th Boao International Poetry Award, a major award for lifetime achievements in Poetry.

Philip Salom began publishing in 1980 and since then has written fourteen books of poetry and five novels. His book Sky Poems won the British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize in London for the overall Best Book of Poetry in the British Commonwealth and his first book The Silent Piano won the earlier Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Book. His collections are praised for their expansive imagination and language. He has received further acclaim through international reviews and from guest appearances in America, Canada, Britain, the Republics of Serbia and Macedonia, Italy, Singapore and New Zealand.

Of his five novels two have been shortlisted for Australia’s most prestigious fiction prize, the Miles Franklin Award (The Returns in 2020 and Waiting in 2016). The Returns was also shortlisted for the 2017 Prime Minister’s Award. Playback won the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Fiction. Salom’s novels have also been shortlisted in the Queensland Premier’s Prize, the ASL Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Prize. The Fifth Season was published in November (Transit Lounge, 2020).

Links: philipsalom.com

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Between Yes and No

Translation: Chris Song Zijiang and Iris Fan Xing

Between Yes and No is a selection of 17 poems, some short, some longer, over 38 pages. Each poem has an English version shown in parallel with a translation into Mandarin by one of the two translators, Chris Song Zijiang and Iris Fan Xing. The editor of this innovative series is Christopher (Kit) Kelen.

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Jan Dean

Jan Dean is a Hunter Region poet. She won the 2018 Newcastle Writers Festival joanne burns Microlit Award for her prose poem ‘Fish Flops and Flaps’ published in Shuffle by Spineless Wonders. She was awarded the Seniors’ Prize sponsored by Baytree by Ardency at the 2019 Lane Cove Literary Awards with ‘Moss Poem’. Her work has been published in Not Very Quiet (online), Southerly, Meanjin, Rabbit Poetry Journal, the Australian, Eucalypt: a tanka journal, and Newcastle Poetry Prize anthologies. She holds a Distinguished Service Award from FAW NSW. Her With One Brush (IP, Queensland) was short-listed for the Mary Gilmore Award and her pocketbook Paint Peels, Graffiti Sings, (Flying Island Books, Macau) is in English and Mandarin.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Paint Peels, Graffiti Sings

In National Library of Australia

trans Ruby Chen, Karen Kun

The title of Jan Dean’s 2014 collection in the ‘Pocket Poets’ series published by Flying Island Books (a joint project of the Association of Stories in Macao and Cerberus Press in Australia) is taken from a line in a short poem called ‘Wonder’ (p.74), near the middle of the collection: “Why do people lament decay / and crave constant renewal? / While paint peels graffiti sings / the wonders of evanescence.” These lines capture the spirit of this collection by a poet with an artist’s eye who always seems to have both eyes open to the wonders of evanescence.

Review: Reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Read more of the review: vacpoetry.org/journal/paint-peels-graffiti-sings

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Mark Tredinnick OAM

Dr Mark Tredinnick BA (Hons), LLB (Hons), MBA, PhD—is a celebrated poet, essayist, and teacher. His many works of poetry and prose include A Gathered Distance, Almost Everything I Know, Egret in a Ploughed Field, Bluewren Cantos, Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Red Writing Book. Since 2003, Tredinnick has published over two hundred works—poems, essays, reviews, papers, and books. For twenty-five years, he’s taught poetry and expressive writing at the University of Sydney, where he was poet in residence in 2018. His many honours include two of the world’s foremost poetry prizes, the Montreal and the Cardiff.

Since 2003, Tredinnick has published over two hundred works—poems, essays, reviews, papers, and books. For twenty-five years, he’s taught poetry and expressive writing at the University of Sydney, where he was poet in residence in 2018. He is a beloved teacher (of writing, literature and ecology), and he’s mentored many writers into print. His many honours include two of the world’s foremost poetry prizes, the Montreal and the Cardiff. ‘His is a bold, big-thinking poetry,’ Sir Andrew Motion has written, ‘in which ancient themes (especially the theme of our human relationship with landscape) are recast and rekindled.’ ‘One of our great poets of place,’ Judy Beveridge has called him.

In 2020, Tredinnick was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for services to literature and education.

Tredinnick’s other honours include two State Premiers’ Literature Prizes, The Blake and Newcastle Poetry Prizes, the ACU and Ron Pretty Poetry Prizes, two Premiers’ Literature Awards, and the Calibre Essay Prize. The Blue Plateau, his landscape memoir, shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize.

Dr Tredinnick’s poetry and prose are translated into many languages (German, French, Italian, and Spanish). In recent years his work has become widely known in China. In April 2019, he spent a month in residence at the Lu Xun Academy in Beijing, a guest of the International Writers Program. A selection of one hundred of his poems appears in Chinese in 2021, along with a book of his essays.

Much of Tredinnick’s work—in poetry, prose, advocacy, and teaching—has explored the syntax of places and the ecologies of speech. ‘Our future and our place in it,’ he has written, ‘may depend on how well we care for the health of both—land and language.’ The moral and spiritual landscapes, the geography of what was once called the soul: this also is Tredinnick’s literary terrain.

Tredinnick is the father of five. He writes and lives with his partner Jodie Williams in the Wingecarribee, southwest of Sydney.

Links: www.marktredinnick.com

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Almost Everything I Know

A selection of Mark’s poems—including, ‘Maybe,’ ‘The Wombat Vedas,’ ‘News of the World, ‘Soft Bombs,’ ‘Catching Fire,’ ‘The Kingfisher,’ and ‘Walking Underwater’—along with immaculate translations into Chinese by Isabelle Li.

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Chan Lai Kuen 陳麗娟:亡星之城

Chan Lai Kuen (a.k.a. Dead Cat) was born in Hong Kong. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a degree in English, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (taken in Hong Kong) with a degree in Fine Art. Her book of poetry Were the Singing Cats (《有貓在歌唱》2010) was awarded Recommendation Prize of the 11th Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature. Prose collection Kyoto that Cannot be Reached (《不能抵達的京都》) was published in 2015. Bilingual poetry selection City of Dead Stars is published in 2014. Chan also creates works of visual art.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

City of Dead Stars

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