Stuart Barnes (poet)

Barnes was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and educated at Monash University, Victoria. His first book, Glasshouses, was awarded the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.[1] The judges of the Anne Elder Award, for which the collection was commended, wrote: "Barnes is compelling, dramatic and imaginative. ... [He] is a major poet in the making; watch this space!".[2] In The Sydney Morning Herald, Jane Sullivan included Glasshouses in 'Books for the year: The treats in store from Australia and overseas in 2016'.[3] The collection has been warmly received by critics: in The West Australian, William Yeoman described it as "playful, subtle, moving, witty and outrageous—a major achievement";[4] in The Australian, Geoff Page noted its "impressive balancing act between a love of precursors and the strategies of the avant-garde".[5]

In his conference paper 'Sonnets and Para-Sonnets', Stephen Guy-Bray, Professor, Department of English, University of British Columbia, said: "Barnes's poems are often created out of other poems, whether literally—as in the case of the five centos he includes [in Glasshouses]—or more metaphorically, as in his use of sonnet form and of quotations. In Glasshouses the sonnet is only one form among many that Barnes plays with, just as the lines of other people’s poetry that make up all of the centos are only one kind of quotation among the many others—conversation, texts, brand names, place names—that fill the book. In blurring the lines between sexual and poetic activity, Barnes sets up a consolation for the lack of sexual success that [his sonnet '10:15 Saturday Night'] recounts, a consolation that is arguably implicit in almost all the sonnet sequences ever written, and certainly in the most famous ones. By the end of the poem the poet Barnes most resembles is perhaps not Shakespeare or any of the other sonneteers of the sixteenth century but rather (to me, at least) Hart Crane."[6]

Barnes's poetry has appeared widely in Australian journals, including Cordite,[7] Overland[8] and Southerly,[9] and has been anthologised.[10][11] Other writing, as selected by Nick Earls, has been published to goa, a network of digital billboards throughout South East Queensland, as part of Queensland Writers Centre's #8WordStory initiative.[12]

Barnes has been a judge for the ACT Writing and Publishing Awards: Poetry Book Category[13] and the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award;[14] from 2017–2019 he was a Program Adviser for Queensland Poetry Festival.[15] From 2014 to 2015 he was poetry editor of Verity La,[16] and from 2013 to 2017 he was poetry editor of Tincture Journal.[17] In 2018 he served on the advisory board of Bent Window Books and guest-edited, with Quinn Eades, Cordite Poetry Review Issue 88: TRANSQUEER.[18] In 2020 he guest-edited, with Charmaine Papertalk Green, Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry Issue 32: FORM.

• NWF Joanne Burns Microlit Award, 2021, finalist for 'Little Gilt'
• Pushcart Prize, 2020, nominated for 'Triolet: Cerberus and Eros'.[26]
• Montreal International Poetry Prize, 2020, shortlisted for 'Off-World Ghazal'.[27]
• Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize, 2017, highly commended for 'Black Swan Polyptych'.[28]
• Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Award, 2017, shortlisted for 'the nomenclature of eggs'.
• Mary Gilmore Prize, 2017, shortlisted for Glasshouses.[29]
• Anne Elder Award, 2016, commended for Glasshouses.[30]
• Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, 2015, winner for Glasshouses.
• Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, 2014, runner-up for Blacking Out and other poems.
• Newcastle Poetry Prize, 2010, shortlisted for 'Caravaggio: A Secret History in Sonnets'.[31]
• Newcastle Poetry Prize, 2009, shortlisted for 'Solomon'.[32]

• Official website
• Stuart Barnes on Twitter
• Stuart Barnes at University of Queensland Press
• Two poems at Poetry Foundation