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Critic of the Month


LISA GORTON

Lisa Gorton grew up in Melbourne and studied literature at the University of Melbourne. She won the inaugural Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, which took her to Ireland for six months. From Ireland, she went on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne's poetry and prose.

Lisa has worked as a lecturer and tutor at a Rhodes University, South Africa, and as the Junior Dean of an Oxford College. She has published academic essays in English and American journals and her essay, 'Space in Donne', won the 2001 John Donne Society Award for Best Essays in Donne Studies.
Returning to Australia, Lisa spent some time in Sydney working in communications at McKinsey & Company; then moved to the country near Byron Bay and, in the same year, started writing for the ABR. She has been living in Melbourne for the past few years.

As well as writing reviews, Lisa writes poems and essays. She has also been working for some years on a novel for children. Her first collection of poetry, Press Release, is due out with Giramondo later this year. Her novel for children, Cloudland, is due out with Pan Macmillan in March, 2008.

Lisa Gorton and ABR

Lisa started reviewing for the ABR in 2003. In the main, she reviews poetry though she has also written longer pieces, including a La Trobe University essay: 'Hostages to Fortune'. ABR has also published some of her poems. She reads every issue of the ABR, partly for ideas about what to read, but more for the sense it gives of a wide-ranging conversation about literature in Australia.

Lisa Gorton on reviewing

In a review, Lisa tries to understand and describe how a work achieves its effects and how it relates to the author's other work. She thinks of the review as a short essay rather than a piece of evaluation, though she tries to give ABR readers enough information to decide whether they would like the work under review.

Apart from the pleasure of close reading, Lisa likes the formal challenge that writing a review provides: the way a review needs to have its own logic while concerning itself almost entirely with the logic of another piece of writing. It's always interesting to figure out how to work the two together-to be short, for instance, without short-changing the book under review.

Some ABR reviews by Lisa Gorton

La Trobe University Essay: 'Hostages to Fortune: Parents and Children', 274/36

Murray, Les, Biplane Houses (Black Inc.) and Collected Poems (Black Inc.), 282/29

Maiden, Jennifer, Friendly Fire (Giramondo), 277/57

Ryan, Judith and Chris Wallace-Crabbe (eds), Imagining Australia (Harvard University Press), 271/30


  

More ABR critics

Geordie Williamson
is a Sydney-based freelance critic and book reviewer. He was born in 1972, and raised in rural New South Wales. He studied English literature at the University of Sydney and University College London, but admits that most of his reading has been off the syllabus. He is currently completing doctoral research in the area of Romantic prose. Geordie was our April Critic of the Month

Gillian Dooley was lucky enough to belong to a family where intellectual and cultural life was as basic as breathing, and where education was more important than new curtains. Gillian was our March 2007 Critic of the Month.

Brian McFarlane has had three sometimes overlapping careers. First was as a schoolteacher, after graduating from the Univers-ity of Melbourne: he taught in schools in Victoria and England, ending this career with fifteen years at Trinity Grammar, Melbourne. Brian was our February 2006 Critic of the Month.

David McCooey is (in alphabetical order) an academic, critic, poet and reviewer. He lives in Geelong where he is a senior lecturer in literary studies at Deakin University. He has been a judge for a number of major literary awards, and he is on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals. David was our December/January 2007 critic of the Month.

ABR board member Bridget Griffen-Foley is well known as a Packer biographer and media critic. She was our November 2006 Critic of the Month.

Freelance critic Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former Editor of ABR and frequent contributor, was our October 2006 Critic of the Month. Read more about Kerryn's relationship to ABR and reviewing in general here.

 

James Ley, this year's judge of the Age Book of the Year (Fiction), was our September 2006 Critic of the Month. Read more about James Ley's approach to reviewing here.

 

Our August 2006 Critic of the Month was Brenda Niall, acclaimed author of The Boyds and Judy Cassab. Read more about Brenda Niall and her reviewing career here.

 

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