Glen Phillips (writer)

Glen Phillips (writer and academic)[edit]

Glen Phillips signing a copy of his latest collection 'In the Hollow of the Land - Volume 1'

Glenly (Glen) Roy Elliott Phillips is an award-winning poet and currently an Honorary Professor who has worked at Edith Cowan University and its predecessors for some 55 years. His poetry concerns landscapes of Western Australia, Italy and China.

Early Life[edit]

Glen Phillips was born in 1936 in the outback gold-mining town of Southern Cross in Western Australia and lived most of his early life in the WA Wheatbelt and jarrah forests of the South-West. Much of his poetry therefore reflects rural life especially that of his farming grandparents in the Avon Valley near Beverley as featured in his two-volume poetry collection, Over the Hills & Far Away: Poems of the WA Wheatbelt. For two years during World War II the family were forced to live in Perth, then under the threat of Japanese invasion. They moved back to the country in1944. In elementary school he first began to write little plays and poetry for his schoolfellows.

He began his secondary education in Perth with the aid of a scholarship, attending the historic Perth Boys’ and Perth Modern Schools where he won a scholarship to study for a BEd honours degree at the University of WA. His studies of English poetry led him back to writing and publishing his own poetry and in 1962, after teaching for several years in a country high school he returned to Perth as a lecturer in English at the Graylands Teachers’ College.

Career[edit]

Here in 1967 he first met well-known Welsh poet Bryn Griffiths who encouraged him to return to his distant Welsh origins and embark on a parallel career both as poet and teacher. Glen’s first books (published in 1969) included anthologies of contemporary world poetry intended for his students and published by Angus & Robertson and the University of WA Press. Intersections, his first book of poems, was published in conjunction with a group of lithographic artists in 1972.

After competing an MEd at UWA, Glen’s career as an academic and administrator led to his appointment in 1978 as an Assistant Director of the newly-formed Mount Lawley College of Advanced Education in Perth. He continued to teach creative writing and English while developing the School of General Studies at MLCAE with new courses in Intercultural and Indigenous Studies and ultimately BA degrees, bachelor, masters and PhD courses in Writing and Public Relations in the Faculty of Arts.

Poetry & Writing[edit]

Glen’s writing career was meanwhile gathering pace as he became President of the Fellowship of Australian Writers and a member of the Australian Society of Authors. In Italy, where he was awarded a scholarship to study Italian at Perugia, he created and co-translated a joint collection of poems of Australian and Umbria with poet and impresario Dr Walter Cerquetti. Umbria e Australia Dorate e Verdi was published by Editrice Sigla Tre (Perugia) in 1986.

Some 45 of Glen’s books and chapbooks have followed, frequently joint-authored. As well, he has edited anthologies and large numbers of his poems have been published separately in journals and newspapers in Australia and overseas.

During this period he also made something of a name for himself in setting up with Bryn Griffiths, Shane McCauley and Alan Alexander, Poetry in Motion—an exclusively Celtic-origin poetry-reading group. With Australia Council for the Arts funding they toured outback and suburban WA and even overseas in Singapore and Thailand. Their anthology, Poetry in Motion (1986) soon sold out. ABC radio and television appearances followed. In 1988 they were commissioned by the Bi-Centenary Authority to create a major performance work on the theme of the Swan River, presented at the Fremantle Art Centre.

Ultimately in 2015 this was published as a book—The River: a Meditation on the Swan and Avon. It is in fact an historical and geographical biography of Perth’s Swan-Avon River system.

Continuing his academic career Glen Phillips became absorbed in the study of landscape according to the new theories of ‘ecocriticism’ spreading from the US and Britain. With artist Judith Dinham he began a project “Landscape and Artists” concentrating on the learning of landscape as a life skill. To test how learning a new landscape as opposed to one’s native landscape, they conducted a program of identifying the elements of a home or birth landscape that are embedded like a native language in early life. Then they set out to ‘learn’ a totally new landscape. As arts practitioners they tried to enhance that new learning experience within their work in print and on canvas. They chose Tuscany as a challenging contrast to the Australian outback. On their return to Australia they set up a post-graduate on-line course called “Landscape and You” supported by a 12-episode television series screened on national TV. Exhibitions and publications of their work followed.

Meanwhile, Glen also became interested in the emerging concept of Writers Centres. Glen led the establishment of WA’s first such example, the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in the former home of Prichard in the foothills of the Darling Range east of Perth city. From this success, Glen helped to establish the Peter Cowan Writers Centre on the Joondalup campus of ECU north of Perth in 1995. This centre is housed within the re-erected home of Edith Cowan, Peter’s grandmother, first woman parliamentarian in Australia. Glen is still an active member of the Centre’s administration.

The final stage of Glen’s poetry career began when he retired from active teaching to become an Honorary Professor and Director of the International Centre for Landscape and Language, which he established at ECU with Professors Andrew Taylor and John Kinsella back in 1990. The ‘Landscape Centre’ has become well-known world wide, partly because it created one of the first ‘on-line’ academic journals, Landscapes, now in its tenth year of existence. The Centre also led to much of Glen’s current intensive involvement in Australian Studies in China. The Centre has hosted many visiting scholars from China working in the field of Australian literary studies and in turn, Glen has given lecture courses all over China at the many Australian Studies Centres in their universities. Additionally, his own poetry has become a common focus of translators (staff and student) in Chinese universities so that over 200 of his poems and stories have now been published there.

Now, with approaching sixty books released, Glen has had quite an extraordinary ‘late flowering’ in his career as a writer and is moving to extend his talents to writing prose fiction and producing illustrative sketches to accompany some of his work. His Collected Poems, In the Hollow of the Land (2018) in two volumes, contains more than 400 poems and 40 sketches.

Awards & Prizes[edit]

1948 WA Education Department Secondary School Scholarship

1951 Claude Hotchin Prize for Young Artists, (highly commended)

1954 Commonwealth Scholarship for tertiary study

1957 Bertha Houghton Prize for Education, University of WA

1979 Tom Collins Poetry Prize, (highly commended)

1980 Italian Government Scholarship, University for Foreigners, Perugia, Italy

1981 Premier’s Prize for Bilingual Book, NSW Government, (highly commended)

1988 Mazzuchelli Poetry Competition, (third prize)

1988 Randolph Stow Poetry Award, (commended)

1989 Mazzuchelli Poetry Competition, (second prize)

2001 Appointed Patron, Katharine Susannah Prichard Foundation

2002 & 2003 Nominated for WA Citizen of the Year Awards (Services to the Arts)

2007 Tom Collins Poetry Prize, Highly Commended

2010 Tom Collins Poetry Prize, Highly Commended

2011 Tom Collins Poetry Prize, Highly Commended

2017 Community Service Award for Dedicated Service to the KSP Foundation

2017 Nominated by Australia-China Friendship Association for Service to Australia-China relations

Publications[edit]

A Partial listing of Glen Phillips works.

Poetry Collections:[edit]

Intersections (1972), Umbria Green/Australia Gold (1986), Poetry in Motion (1985), Sacrificing the Leaves (1988), A Suite of Rooms (1991) Lovesongs;Lovescenes (1991), Spring Burning (1999), Singing Granites (2008), The Moon Belongs to No One (2014), Shanghai Suite(2009), Redshift Cosmology 1 (2010), A Show of Colours (2011), Six Seasons (2012), Nanjing Threnody (2012), The Woman River (2012), Four Elementals (2012), Dugite Country (2012), Wo Ai Ni (2013), A Spanish Suite (2013), Heilongjiang Summers (2013), Morning Star to Evening Star (2013), Gold in Granite (2013), Etruscanini (2013), Kandimalal: Wolfe Creek Poems (2013), Alpi e Prati (2013), Dryandra Dreaming (2014), Winged Seed Songs (2014), Over the Hills (2017), And Far Away (2017), Three in the Campagna (2014), The River (2015), Slings and Arrows I (2015), Land Whisperings (2015), Slings and Arrows 2 (2016), Six City Sonnets (2016), Crouching Tigers, And Hidden Dragons (2017), Five Conversations with the Indian Ocean (2017), Salt-lakes and Salmon Gums (2017), Ten Zen Illustrated (2017), Primavariants (2017), Redshift Cosmology 2 (2017), In the Hollow of the Land: Collected Poems (2018)

Anthology Inclusions:[edit]

Magic 2 (Singapore, 1977), Lip Service (1979), Almanaco Umbro (1983), Yilgarn (1988), Summerland (1980), The Tin Wash Dish (1989), Margins (1989, Wordhord (1989), Celebrations (1989), Sudden Alchemy (1989), Footprints on Paper (1996), A Selection of Chinese and Australian Poems (1994), Selected Australian Lyrical Poems (1992), Contemporary Australian Poetry (2007), The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), Lines in the Sand (2008), Sense Shape Symbol (2012), KSP 25^th Anniversary Anthology (2010), Notes for the Translators (2013), Non So Raw As This Our Land (2013), The Quadrant Book of Poetry (2012) When the Moon is Swimming Naked: Australasian Poetry for the Chinese Youngster (2014), Western Australian Poetry (2017), The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (2014), Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry

Special Collections:[edit]

Poetry Australia, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Literary Review, Salt, Landscapes, An Anthology for Kids, International Journal of Contemporary Humanities,Yilgarn: a History

Journal, Magazine and Newspaper Inclusions:[edit]

Chiron, Westerly,The West Australian, The Critic, Saturday Book Club, Artlook, , Poetry Australia, Australian Book Review Fremantle Arts Review, Margins, Tampa Review (USA), Australian Lyric Poetry (China), The West Australian, Poetry Review (UK), Western Writers, Text, Harambee, Lo Sparviero (Italy), Guardian Express, New Directions in Australian Studies (India), Al Volante, The Literary Review (USA), Marginata, Culbridge (China), API Network Journal, Thirst, Prosopisia (India),The Backpackers Magazine (Thailand), Stylus Poetry Journal, Blood Orange Review (USA), Florence News (Italy), Poetry d’Amour, Creative Connections, Voyages (Florence), An Anthology for Kids (Macau), Southerly, Cordite Magazine

References[edit]

External links[edit]

This article "Glen Phillips (writer)" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Glen Phillips (writer). Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.