Kate Lilley

Kate Lilley was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1960 and moved to Sydney with her family.[1] She is the daughter of writers Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley, and sister of Rozanna Lilley,[1] Joe Flood, Michael Flood and Tom Flood.

After studying at the University of Sydney, she completed a PhD at University of London on masculine elegy, and from 1986 to 1989 was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at St Hilda's College Oxford University working on Seventeenth Century Women's Writing.[2]

Lilley is a scholar of queer, feminist textual theory and history, from 17th century women’s writing to contemporary poetry and poetics. She edited The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish (Penguin Classics, 1994).[3]

She published Versary,[4] her first volume of poems, in 2002, Ladylike[5] in 2012, and Tilt in 2018.[6] In 2010 she edited Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett for UWA Press.[7]

Lilley had a "featured cameo" as Vera Newby in the film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.[8]

She has been an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, where she directed the Creative Writing program from 2013 to 2021. She is now a 'poet-scholar at large' and the poetry editor of Southerly magazine.[9]

• Winner 2002 Grace Leven Prize for Versary
• Winner 2019 Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry for Tilt [10][11]

Poetry

• Versary. (Salt, 2002) [12]
• Round Vienna. (Vagabond Press, 2011) [13]
• Ladylike. (UWA Publishing, 2012) [14][15]
• Tilt. (Vagabond, 2018) [16][17]

Edited

• Margaret Cavendish The Blazing World and Other Writings. (Penguin, 1994)
• Dorothy Hewett Selected Poems. (UWA Press, 2010)[18]

• Kate Lilley Contents page Poems & essays at Australian Literature Resources
• 2 short poems at Snorkel Magazine