Kevin Brophy

KEVIN BROPHY is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. He is a past winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for poetry and the Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Vogel Prize and the FAW Christina Stead Award. In 2015 he was writer-in-residence at the Australia Council's B. R. Whiting Rome Studio, and in 2019-20 at the Keesing Studio in Paris. From 1980 to 1994 he was a founding editor (with Myron Lysenko) of the journal Going Down Swinging. From 2007 until 2020 he was a managing editor and publisher with Five Islands Press. He has been patron of the Melbourne Poets Union since 2004. He is the founder and director of the annual Five Islands Prize for a first book of poetry, and is Emeritus Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. In 2021 he was awarded an Order of Australia (AM) for services to creative writing and education. Kevin has lived in and around Melbourne's inner north suburb of Brunswick for most of his life, growing up there and then raising a family there. He still lives in Brunswick with his partner.