Incandescence is a 12-years-in-the-making poetry collection about people and all their wonderful, messy, painful and joyous complexities. The poems illuminate parenting, relationships, poverty, illness and ways we cope, like yoga, writing, nature connection. Fifteen of the poems in this colleciton have been previously published across ten journals and anthologies. One poem from the manuscript won the FAW Tasmania Poetry Prize 2023 and a further four poems were commended in other laudable competitions.

Susan Austin is a poet, an eco-socialist activist, and a mental health occupational therapist. She has facilitated group programs, including a creative-writing program, in a mental health clinic in Hobart. She grew up in Queensland and now lives in Hobart with her husband and two children. 

Susan has had poems published in journals and magazines including the Australian Poetry Journal, Burrow, Communion, Verity La, Hecate, The Picton Grange Quarterly Review, Semper, Heretical, Famous Reporter, Blue Giraffe, Poetrix, Poetry Matters, Folk ku, Echidna Tracks and Prospect; in the newspapers Fraser Coast Chronicle, Green Left Weekly and The Tasmanian Times; in a Tasmanian young writer’s initiative The Brew.

Susan’s poems have featured in a range of anthologies including the Australian Poetry Anthology (2023), a Fellowship of Writers Tasmania “Net of Hands”; the 2013 Pax Press anthology “Women’s Work: A Collection of Contemporary Women’s Poetry”; the 2019 Ginninderra Press “The Sky Falls Down – An Anthology of Loss” and in the 2020 FAW anthology “When the World is New”. One of her poems opens the 2022 anthology “Quicksilver Water: Oasis Women Poets”. Susan has been a guest performer at two Tasmanian Poetry Festivals, Seasonal Poets (Hadley’s Hotel), the Festival of Golden Words (now the Tamar Valley Writers Festival), the Cygnet Folk Festival and the Tasmanian Writers Festival. She has been featured on Radio National’s Poetica program and participated in a Poets and Painters Exhibition at the Bett Gallery in Hobart. She is also a member of TasWriters, Australian Poetry, and the Fellowship of Australian Writers Tasmania, among a verifiable plethora of other awards and notable achievements.

Susan will be in conversation with Esther Ottaway, renowned and acclaimed Tasmanian poet, author of She Doesn’t Seem Austistic, winner of the 2024 Tasmanian Literary Award for Poetry.

Join Susan and Esther at the Afterword café.