David Prater is an Australian-born writer, editor and parent. His interests include mince pies, ice hockey and Joy Division.
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Best of Australian Poems 2024
My poem “Terminal 1: Aer Lingus” has been selected to appear in the just-published Best of Australian Poems 2024 (Puncher and Wattmann/Australian Poetry), edited by Kate Lilley and Shastra Deo.
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My (northern) summer reads for 2024
One of the first things I do whenever I move to a new place (trust me, I’ve lived in enough cities, towns and villages to know what I’m talking about here) is to visit — and join — the local library. There’s something comforting and consistent about libraries the world over that grounds me. Growing…
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Human Acts: Han Kang receives the Nobel Prize in Literature
The media frenzy in the lead-up to the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature each year, with groundless speculation on likely winners accompanied by breathless reporting of bookies’ odds, unconsciously skewers the practices of the “literary elite”: a fictional apparatus that only serves the purposes of those who do not read or write. The…
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Anthologised and reprised: “Jetlag World”
The last time a poem of mine appeared in a journal was back in 2013. But in the intervening years, the dim flame of my poetic muse has been sustained by the appearance of some of my published poems in a number of anthologies. Suddenly, these old poems have a new agency. They just “hit…
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(Substack) Origin Stories
“Enter the Dreamnation!”
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When career and life collide: Cycling safety in Fryslân
After two years in Paris working for the International Transport Forum at the OECD, my family and I recently moved to a small village in the province of Fryslân in the Netherlands. The contrast between one of the world’s biggest urban agglomerations and our tiny village of 200 is obvious. But I wasn’t prepared for…
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Site/life update: New directions …
The older I get, the more sporadic these site updates become. My single reader will be relieved to know that this time around I’m not announcing a brand new WordPress theme. Although I admit that I recently began looking at alternatives to WordPress, including GitHub, before concluding that such an exercise would constitute an even…
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Postscript: 10 days in Ireland
Well, the roads all rose to greet me, and the days they turned on a pin.
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Preoccupations @ Petit Bain, Paris
A story at the interface between Australian cricket and Canadian doom rock.