Peter Boyle

Peter Boyle was born in Melbourne, Australia, and grew up in Sydney. For many years he worked as a teacher, first in high schools, then for more than twenty-five years with TAFE New South Wales. He started writing poetry in his teens, in part, he has said in interviews, as a way to grapple with the effects of childhood polio. He earned an honours degree in English from Sydney University, a Diploma of Education, an MA in Spanish and Latin American Studies, and in 2018 a Doctorate in Creative Arts.

He is the author of the poetry collections Coming home from the world (1994), The Blue Cloud of Crying (1997), What the painter saw in our faces (2001), Museum of Space (2004), The Apocrypha of William O’Shaunessy (2009), Towns in the Great Desert: New and Selected Poems (2013), Ghostspeaking (2016), Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness (2019) and Notes towards the Dreambook of Endings (2021). With MTC Cronin he is co-author of How does a man re-invent his body? The belated love poems of Thean Morris Caelli (2008).

Boyle’s own work contemplates language and history. The Apocrypha of William O’Shaunessy, an inventive amalgamation of poetry, prose, and “fictive translations from imaginary texts,” is concerned with everything from politics to philology, imagined lands and languages to books and history. In an interview with Mascara Review, Boyle described the book’s form: “It is as much in prose poetry as in free verse form. Its fundamental concern is not narrating a story where the fate of the characters is the reader’s chief interest, though there are quite a few characters in the book.… I think it is a form of its own.”

Boyle has translated French and Spanish poets, including Federico García Lorca, César Vallejo, Luis Cernuda, Pierre Reverdy, René Char and Max Jacob. Selected translations include Eugenio Montejo’s The Trees: Selected Poems 1967–2004 (2004) and Chilean poet Juan Garrido-Salgado’s Unmoving Navigator, who fell in love with the ocean’s darkness / Navagante immóvil, que amó en la oscuridad del océano (2006). He has translated four books by Cuban poet José Kozer: Anima, Tokonoma, Índole and Carece de causa, as well as poetry by Marosa Di Giorgio, Olga Orozco and Jorge Palma. Boyle’s translations have also appeared in the journals Jubilat and American Poetry Review.

Boyle’s awards include the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, the Queensland Premier's Award for Poetry, a National Book Council Banjo Award, and a South Australian Festival Award for Poetry. He lives in Sydney, Australia.