Mark Tredinnick (b. 1962), though an established Australian writer, is a relatively new poet – The Road South, an audio CD (River Road Press 2008), is his first collection. Tredinnick was raised in Epping, a suburb of Sydney. He took degrees in Arts and Law (later completing a PhD in literature), and he worked as a solicitor before spending a decade in book publishing. He has lived in the inner city of Sydney and in the Blue Mountains to the west; he lives now in the NSW Southern Highlands.

In both prose and poetry, Tredinnick’s work has often engaged with language and landscape. Music, too, is an important figure. In his first book, The Land’s Wild Music, Tredinnick recorded his apprenticeship as a nature writer and explored many of the ideas that now play in his work.

His landscape memoir The Blue Plateau (2009) and much of his recent poetry amount to as sustained lyric meditation on the reciprocal relationships at play between (and among) people and the social ecologies in which they make their lives.

Tredinnick’s long poetic gestation gives his writing polish and range. His poems, which employ an easy, fluid line, and which marry traditional pastoral modes with urgent ecological ideas, have earned a string of prizes in the last four years.

Of the long poem ‘Eclogues’, which won the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2007, Jan Owen, noted: it “works elegantly and intimately over a huge terrain. ‘One’s life is an absurd miracle,’ Tredinnick writes, ‘waning as long as it lasts.’ … There is an undertow… pulling the reader into a melancholy closeness to things.”

In his reading of the poems of The Road South, Tredinnick is relaxed and open; delivering a natural oration with a sense of flow and conversation, that invites the listener in.

Fire Diary is shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Award.