Caroline Williamson is a poet and editor. She was born in London, and worked there and in Beijing as a teacher, before turning her hand to editing academic books, museum publications, and a campaigning anti-nuclear magazine. She moved to Melbourne with her Australian partner, where she has worked at Lonely Planet, Museum Victoria and Melbourne University Publishing. Her poems have been published in journals, including Overland, Meanjin, Heat, Rabbit and Cordite, in several Newcastle Prize anthologies, and in Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (ed. Bonnie Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson). Her essay, 'Working Methods: Painting, Poetry and the difficulty of Barbara Guest', based on her masters minor thesis, was published in Jacket magazine #36. Her PhD in creative writing (Monash 2016) examined some of the ways that poets have attempted to deal with climate change in their work, and included a verse narrative dealing with the lives of her coal-mining ancestors in Wales, in the context of what we now know about the damage done by burning fossil fuels. She won the 2014 A. D. Hope prize for the best postgraduate essay presented at the conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, for 'Beyond Generation Green: Jill Jones and the Ecopoetic Process'. Her debut collection of poetry, Time Machines, is published by Vagabond Press.

Picture: Di Cousens

Production and Interview: Tina Giannoukos