The poet Robert Adamson is the winner of the 2011 Patrick White Award. Adamson said he was 'thrilled to be part of White's marvellous legacy, in the company of previous winners like Christina Stead, Gwen Harwood and Randolph Stow.'
The award, worth $18,000, was set up by author Patrick White with the proceeds of his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, and is awarded to authors who 'have made a significant but inadequately recognised contribution to Australian literature'.
Adamson explained that his poetry was inspired by his experiences fishing the Hawkesbury River. 'I love it, it's beautiful, it is the world flowing through my life, full of birds, fish, mangroves, mud and stars. And yet it's not the river I try to write, my poetry's landscape is darker,' he said. ‘I am writing about the internalised landscape.'
Along with his significant body of poetry Adamson has written two volumes of autobiography, which document the lyricism of his boyhood on Sydney's north shore, as well as the brutalism of being institutionalised as a teenager. The most recent of these two memoirs, 'Inside Out', is considered here at BB to be an Australian classic. As is his most well known volume of poems, 'The Clean Dark'.
Adamson of course is also a publisher and one of the driving forces behind Paperbark Press. Barwon Booksellers congratulate him on a richly deserved honour.