Peter Steele (poet)

Peter Daniel Steele AM (22 August 1939 – 27 June 2012) was an Australian poet and academic, who was awarded the Christopher Brennan Award, for lifetime achievement in poetry, in 2010.

Steele was educated at Christian Brothers' College, Perth; Loyola College, Melbourne; the University of Melbourne; Canisius College, Sydney and the Jesuit Theological College, Melbourne. He gained an MA and PhD from the University of Melbourne and joined the academic staff there in 1966. He later administered the Department of English and held a Personal Chair in English there; he went on to become Emeritus Professor of English at the university. He remained at the university until his death in 2012.^[1]

Steele was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta, at Georgetown University and at Loyola University Chicago.

In 2012 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM), for service to literature and higher education as a poet, author, scholar and teacher, and to the Catholic Church.^[2]

Poetry collections

• Word from Lilliput: Poems (1973)
• Marching on Paradise (1984)
• Invisible Riders (1999)
• Plenty: Art into Poetry (2003)
• The Whispering Gallery: Art Into Poetry (2006)
• White Knight with Beebox: New and Selected Poems (2008)
• A Local Habitation: Poems and Homilies (2010)
• The Gossip and the Wine (2011)

Non-Fiction

• The Autobiographical Passion: studies in the self on show (1989) - criticism
• Bread for the Journey: Homilies (2002) - essays
• Braiding the Voices: Essays in Poetry (2012) - criticism

Obituaries

• Australian Book Review^[3]
• The Sydney Morning Herald^[4]

References