about

DAVEY DREAMNATION aka David Prater is an Australian-born writer, editor and researcher.

In 1994 he graduated from the University of Sydney, receiving a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Australian Literature. In 2004 he graduated from the University of Melbourne, receiving a Master of Arts in Creative Writing (1st Class Honours) for his novella, Marzipan: a Confection. In June 2010 his PhD thesis was officially approved by Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. The thesis, an exegesis coupled with an artefact, is an exploration of self-publishing in Australian poetry, with reference to his own self-published works.

Over the last decade his poetry has been published in a range of Australian and international journals including The Age, Voiceworks, Jacket, Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, Island, Meanjin, slope (USA), Divan, JAAM (NZ), papertiger, Going Down Swinging, nthposition (UK), Southerly, FourW, Blast and many other small press journals and web journals. In addition his prose and reviews have appeared in The Weekend Australian, Southern Review, Meanjin, Overland, The Big Issue, Hermes, New England Review, Sleepers Almanac, Traffic and Famous Reporter.

David’s debut poetry collection We Will Disappear was published by Soi3 (Papertiger Media) in August 2007, and was launched at the Melbourne Writers Festival and the Queensland Poetry Festival in that year. The book has been reviewed positively in The Weekend Australian and on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. Poet Jill Jones offered the following testimonial:

“David Prater’s We Will Disappear is a full tilt swerving syntax for a crazy world – speedy, accurate, satiric, tender, intense, visceral, engaged. It’s chocked with wake up calls and rhythms for the new century, sounds of cities, seas, planets, spinning and disappearing, and a lament for what’s passing. All along Prater pitches a dark destabilising line then subverts it with an explosion of pure lyric joy. Formally inventive whilst also dropping beats of pop media jargon and all the transitory idioms we live in, this is a new language for all tomorrow’s aching parties. Exciting, highly charged, and affecting.”

His audio poetry has been broadcast on ABC Radio National, 3RRR (Melbourne) and Eastside FM (The Red Room, Sydney), and published in Meanjin, Going Down Swinging and papertiger: new world poetry. Video recordings of his poetry performances have been broadcast on Channel 31 (Melbourne).

David has been invited to perform at numerous Australian writers’ festivals including the National Young Writers Festival (2000, 2002, 2007), Next Wave Festival (1994, 1998, 2002), the Emerging Writers Festival (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007), the Melbourne Writers Festival (2004, 2007), Overload Poetry Festival (2003, 2004), Queensland Poetry Festival (2007) and the St Kilda Writers Festival (2005, 2006). He has also performed internationally in London, New York City, Sofia (Bulgaria), Ten’ri (Japan), Seoul (ROK), Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Utrecht (the Netherlands), Montreal (Canada), Stockholm (Sweden) and Struga (Macedonia).

In 2000 he self-published his first book of poems, The Happy Farang, dealing with the adventures of a tourist in Thailand and Laos. A second, Abendland, about a traveller in the USA and Europe, was published in 2006. Vagabond Press published a third, Morgenland, in 2007. His poetry has been translated into Japanese, Korean, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Swedish and has appeared in several haiku anthologies. His work has been been profiled in the Japanese literature magazine Shueisha.

In 2004 David received a New Work grant from the Australia Council for the Arts which allowed him to complete the manuscript for We Will Disappear, described above. In 2005 he undertook a four month Asialink residency at Sogang University, Seoul, where he also wrote a series of prose poems about ‘imaginary cities’ in internet gaming rooms known as PC Bangs. His residency was featured in articles in the NTEU Advocate and The Korea Times. In 2009 he returned to Seoul for a second Asialink residency, hosted by the Korea Language Translation Institute.

David’s poem “In a Dim Sea Nation” was included in Best Australian Poetry 2003 (UQP). Several poems have also been anthologized, notably in Short Fuse: the Global Anthology of Fusion Poetry (Rattapallax USA, Todd Swift and Phil Norton, eds), In the Criminal’s Cabinet (nthposition, UK 2004), World Haiku 2005 (WHA, Japan) and Future Welcome: the Mooshead Anthology X (DC Books, Canada 2005). In 2011, his poem ‘Cute’ was selected in Best Australian Poems 2011 (ed. John Tranter, Black Inc), and five of his poems were anthologised in Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, ed. Felicity Plunkett).

Between 2001 and 2012, David was the Managing Editor of Cordite Poetry Review, an Internet poetry journal funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. He produced thirty full issues of the magazine, plus ten mini-issues, with a focus on new works by a diverse range of emerging and established Australian poets. He also conducted over twenty interviews for Cordite with poets, editors, filmmakers, librarians, musicians and even an online avatar.

David has extensive experience as a creative writing tutor at the tertiary level, having taught in the Department of English at the University of Melbourne between 2003 and 2004; as a guest lecturer at Sogang University (Seoul) in 2005; and in 2007 as a workshop convener, tutor and lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology. In addition he has given guest workshops for Frankston TAFE, the Melbourne CAE and the St Kilda Writers Festival.

Since 2001 he has maintained a series of creative websites at various addresses, the contents of which have now been amalgamated on this site. daveydreamnation.com contains over eleven hundred posts, including more than three hundred poems, over one hundred prose pieces, records from his residency in Seoul, details of all of his publications as well as news, photos and other ephemera.

In addition to his experience as a creative writer, David has also been employed in a variety of educational, policy and research settings. From 2002 to 2005 he was a researcher at the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. From 2000-2002 he worked as a research associate at CIRCIT, an information and communications technology research centre formerly located at RMIT University, Melbourne.

In 1998, before moving to Melbourne, he worked as a copywriter with Doubleday Books in Sydney. In 1996 and 1997 he worked as a researcher and report writer at Royal North Shore Hospital (St Leonards, Sydney) and Nepean Hospital (Kingswood, Sydney) respectively. From 1994 to 1995 he was employed as a Graduate Administrative Assistant in the Department of the Arts and Administrative Services in Canberra and Darwin. David has also worked in various capacities as a milk boy, storeman, kitchen hand, dishwasher, electoral roll review officer, bar person and interviewer.

Awards & Prizes

2009: Asialink Residency, Seoul
2007: Arts Victoria New Work Grant
2007: June Shenfield Poetry Award, Swinburne University of Technology
2005: Commonwealth Australian Postgraduate Scholarship (APA)
2005: Asialink Residency, Seoul
2004: Australia Council for the Arts New Work grant
1996: Student Union Literature Competition, University of Sydney
1993: Henry Lawson Prizes for Poetry and Prose, University of Sydney
1993: Australian Literature Honours bursary, University of Sydney