Geoffrey Lehmann

Geoffrey Lehmann

Geoffrey Lehmann is an Australian poet and former taxation lawyer. He grew up in Sydney and attended the University of Sydney where he completed a combined degree in Arts and Law. He also co-edited the university magazines Arna and Hermes with fellow student and poet Les Murray.

Lehmann’s poetry was first published in The London Magazine when he was eighteen and he was the first Australian poet to be published by the London publishing house Faber and Faber with his first volume of poetry The Ilex Tree, published jointly with Les Murray, which went on to win the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry in 1965. He was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1994.

Since then he has published seven further collections of poetry, as well as a Selected Poems (1976) and a Collected Poems (1997), which won his third Grace Leven Poetry Prize, after Nero’s Poems: Translations of the Public and Private Poems of the Emperor Nero also won in 1981.

Lehmann’s other collections are A Voyage of Lions and other poems (1968), Conversation with a Rider (1972), Ross’ Poems(1978), Children’s Games (1990), Spring Forest (1992), and Baking at Night: and other poems (2003). In addition to his poetry, Lehmann has written a novel and edited several anthologies of Australian poetry, including the seminal Australian Poetry Since 1788 (2011) with Robert Gray.

A lawyer by training, he has been a partner at an international accounting firm, and co-author of five editions of a major taxation text and chairman of the Australian Tax Research Foundation.