Reason & Lovelessness

Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, essays, biography, history, criticism, novels, short stories, libretti and reportage. Hill's major works include Broken Song: T G H Strehlow & Aboriginal Possession (2002) and Peacemongers (2015), a personal, extended meditation on war and atomic destruction, and those thinkers, in Asia especially, who sought to undermine the cultural foundations of tendencies to conflict and destruction.

As a writer, Hill's voice is informed by Australian working-class and labourist vernaculars, inherited from his childhood; an education in arts, education, and psychology at the Universities of Melbourne and London; and wide reading across the Western canon during more than forty years as a full-time writer. His enduring interest in the contribution of Asian thinkers, especially Tagore, to the world, and an insistence on the importance of a creative approach to literary form, shape his entirely unique voice. His insight is both profoundly important and capable of taking the reader to places not glimpsed before or imagined visible from the light presented.

This collection of essays, reviews and reportage, some published for the first time, amply demonstrates the quality and enduring importance of Hill's contribution, in these genres, to Australian literary and intellectual life.