Welcome

I’m David Prater, an Australian writer living in Fryslân.

About me

I was born in 1972 in Dubbo, Australia. The rest, as they say, is history.

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An image of a road and a mountain

My portfolio

Browse a portfolio of my recent, not-so-recent and long-running creative projects.

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My books

Transition Vamps

My third poetry collection spans three decades of my writing life, with poems set variously in Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands and Australia.

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Leaves of Glass

Inspired by letters between Walt Whitman and Bernard O’Dowd, my second poetry collection samples, plunders and re-imagines both poets’ works.

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We Will Disappear

My debut poetry collection navigates the landscapes of loneliness and solitude, drawing on ten years of transformative travelogues and elegies. 

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Reviews and testimonials

Prater’s half rhymes, alliteration and shuffle of syntax are heady. There’s often a parade of phonemes teasing you. You try to wrestle-hold the words but they spin you around as if you were a Jack Russell hanging onto a little boy’s tailcoat.
alicia sometimes reviewing We Will Disappear on ABC Radio National
Relentlessly racy, Prater hits hard and fast in his attempts to keep up with the wrenching juggernaut of our times.
Justin Clemens reviewing We Will Disappear in The Australian
In our information-saturated, hyper-connected, post-industrial world there is so much to take in, and Prater is able to call its tune.
Ryan Scott reviewing We Will Disappear in Cordite Poetry Review
Leaves of Glass is a complex, dense and multi-faceted book, but the premium Prater puts on fun means it is always a rollicking read. It is a book that is serious but never takes itself too seriously.
Liam Ferneyreviewing Leaves of Glass in Southerly
Prater is merciless in pinpointing the atavism that binds our current version of nationalism to its nineteenth century archetypes—the virtue of this book is that it so effortlessly inhabits both periods simultaneously.
John Hawke reviewing Leaves of Glass in Westerly
Leaves of Glass is a linguistically and structurally nimble work, constantly surprising and definitively idiosyncratic.
Fiona Wrightreviewing Leaves of Glass in The Australian
The O’Dowd–Whitman correspondence provides scaffolding for this collection, which is nevertheless a masterful engagement with complex poetic techniques of voice and structure. 
Sally Evansreviewing Leaves of Glass in Cordite Poetry Review
Prater’s poems flow like the text on CNN, but beautifully.
Derek Motionreviewing Abendland
There is even a translation of Whitman’s ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ into the language of LOLcats, that is, rewriting the poem as though by a cat (‘Gowayz Ob Lol: “O Kitteh! Meh Kitteh!”’).
Graeme Milesreviewing Leaves of Glass in Australian Book Review
The unbounded expansion of possibilities, of
language, poetics and meaning, gives the poems
in Transition Vamps their momentum. . . . The poems move with
the stutter step of a mouse’s scroll wheel and
the teleportation of a clicked link.
Liam FerneyIntroduction to Transition Vamps (forthcoming)

My Substack newsletter

I publish a weekly newsletter on Substack, featuring long-form content about music, writing, cycling, family history and whatever else comes to mind. Check out the latest posts and if you like what you see, feel free to subscribe.

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Read my poems online

Many of my poems have appeared in print and online journals, both in Australia and internationally.

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My poems in anthologies

Some of my poems have also been republished in annual and bespoke anthologies.

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Special editions

Morgenland

The poems in my limited-edition chapbook Morgenland (2007) were written in the Republic of Korea and Japan in 2005–06 as part of an Asialink residency.

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Self-published chapbooks

Abendland

Poems written while travelling in the United States and Europe in 2005, self-published in print in 2006 and digitally reissued in 2012.

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The Happy Farang

Poems written while backpacking through Thailand and Laos in 1999, self-published in print in 2000 and lovingly restored in 2012.

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Övergången

A bilingual chapbook, featuring ten poems in English and Swedish, with translations provided by Boel Schenlaer and Linda Bönström.

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Tjugotvå

Twenty-two poems written in Sweden and sent to subscribers to my short-lived ‘Poem of the Week’ newsletter in 2011-12.

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