Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne in 1949 and has lived in Sydney and Brisbane. He has published numerous books of poems including The Ash Range (since republished by Shearsman Books), which won the Victorian Premier's New Writing Award; The Epigrams of Martial, winner of the Wesley Michael Wright Prize; Mangroves, selected as The Age Poetry Book of the Year in 2003, and winner of the 2004 ASAL Gold Medal; and Compared to What: Selected Poems 1971-2003 (also from Shearsman Books). His cultural history Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture, 1901-1939, was published by University of Queensland Press in 2001. He was poetry editor of Meanjin from 1994 to 1997. Until recently he was a Senior Lecturer/ Writer-in-Residence in the School of Arts, Media and Culture at Griffith University in Brisbane and an Honorary Research Advisor in the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Queensland, but moved home in the summer of 2006 to Kent, in south-east England.