Robert Adamson (17 May 1943 – 16 December 2022) was an Australian poet and publisher.

Biography

Born in Sydney, Adamson grew up in Neutral Bay and spent much of his teenage years in Gosford Boys Home for juvenile offenders. He discovered poetry while educating himself in gaol in his 20s. His first book, Canticles on the Skin, was published in 1970. He acknowledges the influence of, among others, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Hart Crane upon his writing. But also American poets such as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley were important and influential contemporaries. In the 1970s and 1980s, he edited New Poetry magazine and established Paper Bark Press in 1986 with his partner, photographer Juno Gemes, and writer Michael Wilding, which published Australian poetry. Wilding left the company in 1990, and Gemes and Adamson continued to run the company until 2002. In 2011 he won the Patrick White Award and the Blake Poetry Prize. Adamson was appointed the inaugural CAL chair of poetry at UTS (University of Technology, Sydney) in 2012.

Death

Adamson died in palliative care (Neringah Hospital), Wahroonga, New South Wales on 16 December 2022, at the age of 79.

Works

Poetry

Autobiography

Awards