Vivian Smith

Vivian Smith studied at University of Tasmania. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with University of Sydney. Distinctions recorded are Patrick White Award, Centenary Medal, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

• Name — Vivian Smith • Birth Name — Vivian Brian Smith • Born — 3 June 1933 • Birthplace — Hobart, Tasmania, Australia • Occupation — poet • Language — English • Notable Works — Tide Country • Years Active — 1950– • Honorific Suffix — FAHA

Smith was born in Hobart, Tasmania and studied French at the University of Tasmania from which he graduated with a Master of Arts. He left Tasmania in the late 1950s and has lived since then in Sydney, where he was a longtime professor at the University of Sydney until his retirement in the early 2000s. He returns to Tasmania every year and his poetry is still influenced by the landscape there. Smith has published criticism as well as a bibliography of the work of Patrick White. He has been an advocate of Australian literature and of many individual Australian writers.

Smith's first book of poetry, The Other Meaning, was published in 1956 and he has since published eight further collections, among which Tide Country won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Poetry and the Grace Leven Prize. A key later collection is Along The Line (Salt, 2007). He is a highly respected critic, having produced key studies on Australian literature and contributed much to the growth and sophistication of criticism surrounding Australian poetry. With his fellow poet and great friend, the late Noel Rowe, he published the anthology Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry (Pandanus Books 2006).

Smith was interviewed in 1971 by Hazel de Berg about his life history and career. The recording can be found at the National Library of Australia.

• Australian Poetry 1969 (1969) edited • Young St Poets Anthology (1981) edited • Quadrant Twenty-Five Years (1982) edited with Lee Shrubb and Peter Coleman • Effects of Light: The Poetry of Tasmania (1985) edited with Margaret Scott • Australian Poetry 1986: the finest of recent Australian poetry (1986) edited • Australian Poetry 1988: the finest of recent Australian poetry (1988) edited • Sydney's Poems: A Selection on the Occasion of the City's One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary 1842-1992 (1992) edited with Robert Gray • Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry (2006) edited with Noel Rowe

• The Writing of Novels and Short Stories, [and], James McAuley's Recent Poetry edited with Gavin Casey (1964) * • Nettie Palmer: Her Private Journal Fourteen Years, Poems, Reviews and Literary Essays (1988) *