Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry,
essays, biography, history, criticism, novels, short stories, libretti, and
reportage. As a writer, Hill’s voice is informed by his Australian working-class and militant union background, which has been distilled by his higher education in history and philosophy at the Universities of Melbourne and London. Hill’s voice is unique, and his insight both profoundly important and capable of taking the reader to places not glimpsed before or imagined visible.
His major works include Sitting In (1992), a landmark memoir in Labour
History; Broken
Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), a
literary biography and essay in Aboriginal and frontier poetics;
and Peacemongers (2014),
a pilgrimage book set in India and Japan, and a meditation on 'peace
thinking' by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi in the
years leading up to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each book
has been groundbreaking in different ways: deeply, originally
researched, multi-disciplinary and crossing genres, combining the personal
with the generically philosophical.
After a decade working as a teacher, educational
psychologist, and a journalist in Melbourne and London, he has been writing
full-time since 1976 — mainly based in Queenscliff, Victoria, but with stints at
the Australia Council flat in Rome, where he finished poetic and dramatic works on
Lucian Freud and Antonio Gramsci, and returns to Central Australia. In recent
decades he has deepened his studies in Chinese and Japanese, which is
in keeping with his long-term interest in Buddhism.
This collection of essays, reviews, and reportage amply
demonstrates the quality and enduring importance of Hill’s contribution, in
these genres, to Australian literary and intellectual life.
