I’m an Australian-born writer and editor currently living in Fryslân.

I was born in 1972 in Dubbo, Australia, and spent my childhood in a number of country towns in New South Wales. I completed high school in Wollongong before moving to Sydney to attend university in 1990.

Over the past four decades, my poetry has been published in a range of Australian and international journals and anthologies. In addition, my prose and reviews have appeared in numerous outlets.

I hold a BA (Hons) from the University of Sydney (1993), an MA (English) from the University of Melbourne (2004) and a PhD from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne (2010).

My MA thesis, a novella, concerned the invention of marzipan. My PhD thesis, an exegesis coupled with an artefact, was an exploration of self-publishing in Australian poetry.

In 2000 I self-published my 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 United States and Europe, appeared in 2006. Vagabond Press published a third, Morgenland, in 2007.

In 2004 I received a New Work grant from the Australia Council for the Arts which allowed me to complete the manuscript for my debut poetry collection, We Will Disappear.

Soi3 (Papertiger Media) published We Will Disappear in August 2007, and launched it at the Melbourne Writers Festival and the Queensland Poetry Festival in that year.

In 2007 I received a New Work grant from Arts Victoria, which enabled me to write the poems collected in Leaves of Glass. Puncher and Wattmann published Leaves of Glass in 2013.

In 2005 I undertook a four-month Asialink residency at Sogang University, Seoul, where I wrote a series of fictions about ‘imaginary cities’ in PC bangs (Internet gaming rooms) and a series of poems which Vagabond Press published as Morgenland in 2007.

In 2009 I returned to Seoul for a second Asialink residency, hosted by the Korea Language Translation Institute.

My poetry has been translated into Japanese, Korean, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Swedish and has appeared in several haiku anthologies. My work has been been profiled in the Japanese literature magazine Shueisha.

I have been invited to perform at numerous Australian writers’ festivals including the National Young Writers Festival (2000, 2002, 2007), the Next Wave Festival (1994, 1998, 2002), the Emerging Writers Festival (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007), the Melbourne Writers Festival (2004, 2007), the Overload Poetry Festival (2003, 2004), the Queensland Poetry Festival (2007) and the St Kilda Writers Festival (2005, 2006).

I have also performed his work 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).

My poem ‘In a Dim Sea Nation’ was included in Best Australian Poetry 2003 (UQP). In 2011, my poem ‘Cute’ was selected in Best Australian Poems 2011 (Black Inc.), and five poems were anthologised in Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011).

Between 2001 and 2012, I was Managing Editor of Cordite Poetry Review, an Internet poetry journal funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. I produced 30 full issues of the magazine, plus 10 mini-issues, with a focus on innovative new works by a diverse range of emerging and established Australian poets.

I have gained 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.

Since 2001 I have maintained a series of creative websites at various addresses, the contents of which have now been amalgamated on this site. [d/dn] contains over 1,200 posts, including more than 400 poems, over 100 prose pieces, records from my two residencies in Seoul, details of publications as well as news, photos and other ephemera.

In addition to my experience as a creative writer, I have over 20 years of experience as an editor and have been employed in a variety of educational, policy and research settings.

Feel free to contact me. Oant sjen!

David Prater
Fryslân, 2025