Lisa Jacobson

Lisa Jacobson

Photo credit: Hayley Austen

Lisa Jacobson is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her verse novel, The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press, 2012), won the 2014 Adelaide Festival John Bray Poetry Award and was shortlisted for four national awards: the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the 2013 Stella Prize, the 2012 Wesley Michel Wright Prize and, as a manuscript, for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Poems in this book have either won or been shortlisted for major awards: the 2011 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Fish International Poetry Prize (U.K.). Jacobson has also won the HQ/Harper Collins Short Story Award, second prize in The Age Short Story Award (Melbourne), and a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. Her debut poetry collection was Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five Islands Press) in 2005.

Her work has been broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Poetica and Books & Arts Daily and been published in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, the U.S. and the U.K. She studied literature at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities, and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe.

Lisa Jacobson lives in Melbourne with her partner and daughter. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and has taught at universities for over twenty-five years. She has also worked as a dog trainer, bushfire recovery officer, bushfire memorial writer, and therapeutic care worker for troubled adolescents. She has been influenced by her travels to Israel, the Red Sea, Amsterdam, Paris, the Swiss Alps, the Great Barrier Reef and Alice Springs.