Authors » John Mateer
John Mateer
John Mateer was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published five books of poems and a prose travelogue on Indonesia with Fremantle Press. He has given readings of his work at poetry festivals in Europe, Asia, Australia and South Africa. Selections of his poems have been translated into Japanese, Indonesian, Portuguese and German. Of his work The Japan Times has written: ‘Mateer’s manner and the complex resonances of his work reminded me a little of the prose of his compatriot, the Nobel-prize-winning novelist JM Coetzee. The poems are inquisitorial, ethically preoccupied and sometimes powerfully intense.’
Awards
Winner, Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, Centenary Medal, 2001
Books available from Fremantle Press
- The West 2010
- Ancient Capital of Images, The 2005
- Semar's Cave 2004
- Loanwords 2002
- Barefoot Speech 2000
- Anachronism 1997
- Burning Swans 1994
From the Catalogue
Wilderness Society Award
Congratulations to Sally Morgan whose book The Last Dance won the Wilderness Society’s 2013 Environment Award for Children’s Literature. Meg McKinlay and Kyle Hughes-Odgers were also shortlisted in the same category for Ten Tiny Things