Wikipedia

Gig Ryan

Gig Ryan
Born
Elizabeth Anne Martina Ryan

(1956-11-05) November 5, 1956 (age 69)[1]
Leicester, England
OccupationPoet
Critic[2]
Nationality Australian
EducationLa Trobe University (B.A.)[3]
University of Sydney
University of Melbourne[1]
Monash University (Ph.D.)
Notable worksSelected Poems (2012)
RelativesPeter John Ryan (father)

Gig Ryan, born Elizabeth Anne Martina Ryan, is an Australian poet. She is a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award.

Early life

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Ryan was born in Leicester, England in 1956.[4] This was when her father, Australian surgeon Peter John Ryan, had taken the family to England to gain his surgical qualifications (FRCS). After they returned in 1957, Ryan grew up in Melbourne, and was educated in the Catholic school system.

In 1993, Ryan earned a B.A. in Latin and Ancient Greek,[3] and in 2020, she earned her doctorate in Creative writing at Monash University.[5]

Career

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At eighteen, Ryan won the Victorian 1974 Maryborough Prize, and published her first poems. Ryan lived in Sydney 1978–1990, and later became poetry editor of The Age newspaper (1998–2016). Before moving to Sydney, she co-founded a Melbourne women writers' magazine Luna in 1974,[3] which she then worked on until '78.[6] For the Saturday Age, Ryan selected "a new short poem" every week.[2] She has also recorded her songs with the bands 'Disband' and 'Driving Past'.

For her work that "links feminine silence with masculine violence", Ryan has been noted as a "remarkable feminist poet", [7] and "the voice of radical feminist protest."[6] In a 1981 review of her debut collection The Division of Anger, R.A. Simpson compared Ryan to John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara for her "Action Painting"-based approach.[8] Another essay praised Ryan's work––or the "fascinating poems"[9] in her 2011 New and Selected Poems in particular––for providing a modern "lens to the psychic and affective terrain of interiority in politically saturated times".[10] Her poetry is recognised as being "readily to hand in the vernacular", often making "use of found tags and 'hip' phrases".[11]

Ryan's speech at the 2010 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize presentation ranked fourth on Overland's "Top Ten Poetic Moments of 2011".[12] An excerpt from her speech includes:

"Poetry is our response to the world, but it’s also the thing we poets find the most taxing, the best of engaging our brains. Ideally – like all good art – it should make us think." –– Ryan, from 'Some Random Notes About Contemporary Poetry'[13]

In 1998, Ryan gave a eulogy at a memorial mass for the poet John Forbes at St Brigid's Church in Melbourne.[14] In 2016, on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, seventeen poets came together to contribute a couple lines each to a poem. The poem was edited by Corey Wakeling, who in the "Afterword", noted that Ryan's poetry "cites the many philosophical and political problems of the contemporary world, yet has the contrary aesthetic reputation of untimeliness, ambiguity, angularity, even defiance."[15]

In her essay titled "Australian Poetry Now", poet Bronwyn Lea named Ryan among the frontrunners of "innovative and experimental" Australian poetry.[16] In her review of New and Selected Poems, Ann Vickery looked at a possibility that the collection would become a staple "among the bookshelves of local poetry lovers" and, not long after, "of a more international audience", noting that it compiled "some of the best Australian poetry written over the past thirty years."[13] The collection was published by Bloodaxe as Selected Poems in 2012, making it her first UK publication.[17] Later, Ryan's second collection Manners of an Astronaut, first published in 1984, was published in the UK as part of the Shearsman Library in 2018.[18]

Alongside Panda Wong, Ryan served as a guest editor for the Best of Australian Poems anthology in 2023.[19]

Awards and recognition

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  • 1988: Writer's Fellowship, Literature Board of the Australia Council[3]

Her book Pure and Applied won the 1999 C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and Heroic Money was shortlisted for the 2002 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. New and Selected Poems was shortlisted for the 2012 Prime Minister's Award for Poetry and the 2012 ASAL award, and winner of the 2012 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.[3][20]

Bibliography

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  • The Division of Anger (Transit Press, 1981) ISBN 9780959437713
  • Manners of an Astronaut (Hale and Iremonger, 1984) ISBN 9780868060910
  • The Last Interior (Scripsi Magazine, 1986) ISBN 9780959203714
  • Excavation (PanPicador Australia, 1990) ISBN 9780330271936
  • Pure and Applied (Paper Bark Press / Craftsman House, 1998) ISBN 9780958648264
  • Research (Folio/Salt, 1999)
  • Heroic Money (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2001) ISBN 9781876040338
  • New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 2011) ISBN 9781920882662

Discography

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  • "Six Goodbyes" Disband, Big Home Productions (1988)
  • "Church Fete" Driving Past, Chapter Music (1998)
  • "Real Estate" Driving Past, Chapter Music (1999)
  • "Travel" Driving Past, Jacana Records (2006)

References

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  1. ^ a b "Ryan, Gig 1956–". Encyclopedia.com. 25 October 2025. Retrieved 21 November 2025.
  2. ^ a b Cassidy, Bonny (1 July 2014). "Profit is rare, but poetry's weird blooms persist". The Conversation. ISSN 2201-5639. Retrieved 21 November 2025.
  3. ^ a b c d e "Gig Ryan". AustLit: Discover Australian Stories. The University of Queensland. Retrieved 21 March 2025.
  4. ^ "Ryan, Gig (1956–)". Australian Poetry Library. Archived from the original on 2 August 2012. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  5. ^ "2020 Completions – Arts" (PDF). Monash University: 3. 16 April 2020. Retrieved 21 November 2025.
  6. ^ a b "Unit-5 Mudrooroo Narogin & Gig Ryan". IGNOU – eGyanKosh. 2017. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  7. ^ Hodge, Siobhan (2018). "Modern Myths: Feminism and Literary Predecessors in the Poetics of Gig Ryan and Cassandra Atherton". Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia. 9 (1). Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  8. ^ Simpson, R.A. (May 1981). "Snapshots". Australian Book Review (30). ISSN 0155-2864. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  9. ^ Duwell, Martin (1 December 2011). "Gig Ryan: New and Selected Poems". Australian Poetry Review. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  10. ^ Wakeling, Corey. "New and Selected Poems". Reading Australia. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  11. ^ Indyk, Ivor (24 April 2015). "Gig Ryan and difficulty". Sydney Review of Books. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  12. ^ Mokhtari, Tara (14 December 2011). "Top Ten Poetic Moments of 2011". Overland Journal. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  13. ^ a b Vickery, Ann (4 May 2012). "Gig Ryan's New and Selected Poems". Cordite. ISSN 1328-2107. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  14. ^ Ryan, Gig Elizabeth. "in memoriam John Forbes". Jacket3. Retrieved 21 November 2025.
  15. ^ Wakeling, Corey (5 November 2016). "On the Occasion of Gig Ryan's Sixtieth Birthday". Overland Journal. Retrieved 21 November 2025.
  16. ^ Lea, Bronwyn (2 May 2016). "Australian Poetry Now". Poetry. 208 (2). Chicago: The Poetry Foundation: 185–191. ISSN 0032-2032. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  17. ^ "Gig Ryan". Bloodaxe Books. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  18. ^ "Gig Ryan - Manners of an Astronaut". Shearsman Books. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  19. ^ "Announcing Best of Australian Poems 2023". Australian Poetry. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
  20. ^ "The books we loved in 2019". The Sydney Morning Herald. 13 December 2019. ISSN 0312-6315. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
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