Tracy Ryan (born 1964) is an Australian poet and novelist. She has also worked as an editor, publisher, translator, and academic.
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Life
Tracy Ryan was born in Western Australia, where she grew up as part of a large family. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from Curtin University and studied European languages at the University of Western Australia; her PhD (2013) was also from that university.
She has lived in Cambridge, England, where she worked as a bookseller, tutor, editor, and writer. She was Judith E. Wilson Junior Visiting Fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge in 1998. She taught Australian Literature and Film at the University of East Anglia. She has also lived in Ohio in the USA.
She is married to poet John Kinsella and has two children.
Literary career
Tracy Ryan has published over fifteen books, including five novels. Her poetry has appeared in several magazines, such as Salt, Literary Review, and Cordite. She has also appeared in anthologies. Ryan has translated several French writers, including Hélène Cixous, Maryline Desbiolles, and Francoise Han.
In the 1990s, Ryan, with Australian poet John Kinsella, developed Folio(Salt), an offshoot of Salt Magazine.
Reviewer Tim Allen, reviewing the anthology Foil, wrote of her poetry as follows: "Tracy Ryan's poems are tightly packed vibrations of spiky conceits. They have a restless intelligence which seems to suspect everything they touch; the references are scholarly and the contention is feminist but the result is polychromatic."
The John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize was established in 2005 and is open to members of the University of Cambridge. The award is for an original verse composition in any form, of 500 lines or less.
Themes and inspiration
Ryan's poetry has been compared, by poet Dorothy Hewett, with Sylvia Plath, and Debra Zott, in her review of Hothouse, agrees, saying that "certainly, there are [in Ryan's poetry] the mythic underpinnings one finds in Plath's poetry, as well as that quality of imbuing the personal with highly dramatised mythic proportions" and that "it is no secret that Ryan has been influenced by Plath". However, she argues that "the very mention of Plath's name shapes, and threatens to place limits on, the reader's experience of Ryan's poetry", that "Tracy Ryan's poetry does not need the Plath myth to prop it up".
In 2001, Ryan said the following about her writing:
I don't adhere to any particular school of thought, except in the broadest sense that my writing is inextricably bound up with my feminism. This would be the only real connector between my books. I am interested in trying to find ways in which language may be interrupted, disrupted and rejigged for feminist purposes (among others). Usually this attempt would arise from something in either my personal life or the world around me. My home state is currently enacting a legal clamp-down on women, with regard to street prostitution—passing laws that restrict women's movements and rights to occupy space. Though such factors are often what 'provokes' me into a poem, the poem equally draws life off other books (like most poets, I spend a lot of time reading). I work by a kind of principle of immersion in particular poets at particular times.
Awards and nominations
1987 Mattara Poetry Prize, Winner
1994 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Prize for Poetry: Shortlisted for Killing Delilah
1995 T. A. G. Hungerford Award for Fiction: Shortlisted for Vamp
1996 John Bray Poetry Award, Adelaide Festival: Shortlisted for Killing Delilah
1996 Times Literary Supplement: Poems on the Underground short poem competition: Joint winner
1997 National Book Council Banjo Award, Commended
1998 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award, Shortlisted for Bluebeard in Drag
2000 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Prize for Poetry: Winner for The Willing Eye
2007 Trudie Graham Award for Memoir, Winner
2008 The Age Book of the Year Award (poetry), Shortlisted for Scar Revision
2009 Australian Book Review Poetry Prize, Winner
2011 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Prize for Poetry: Winner for The Argument
2023 Western Australian Writer's Fellowship
Works
Poetry
Killing Delilah (1994, Fremantle Arts Centre Press) ISBN 1863680683
Intensities of Blue (1995, Folio, with John Kinsella) ISBN 0646270648
Bluebeard in Drag (1996, Fremantle Arts Centre Press) ISBN 1863681345
Slant (1997, rempress) ISBN 1901361039
Lines of Sight (1997, Folio, with John Kinsella) ISBN 1901994007
The Willing Eye (1999, Fremantle Arts Centre Press) ISBN 1863682392
ex opere operato (2000, vagabond)
Hothouse (2002, Fremantle Arts Centre Press) ISBN 1863683518
Conspiracies (2003, Salt, with John Kinsella) ISBN 1844710181
bloc notes (2007, equipage)
Scar Revision (2008, Fremantle Press) ISBN 9789213610671
The Argument (2011, Fremantle Press) ISBN 9781921361807
Unearthed (2013, Fremantle Press) ISBN 1921888636
The Water Bearer (2018, Fremantle Press) ISBN 9781925164961
Rose Interior (2022, Giramondo) ISBN 9781925818963
Novels
Vamp (1997, Fremantle Arts Centre Press) ISBN 1863681728
Jazz Tango (2002, Fremantle Arts Centre Press) ISBN 1863683615
Sweet (2008, Fremantle Press) ISBN 9781921361302
Claustrophobia (2014, Transit Lounge) ISBN 9781921924729
We Are Not Most People (2018, Transit Lounge) ISBN 9781925760040
The Queen's Apprenticeship (2023, Transit Lounge) ISBN 9781923023031
The War Within Me (2025, Transit Lounge) ISBN 9781923023390
Edited
Fremantle Poets 1: New Poets (2010, Fremantle Press) ISBN 9781921361814
Plays
Smith Street (Between Heaven and Hell) (2001, three-act play, produced at University of Western Australia, with John Kinsella)