David Brooks

David Gordon Brooks (born 12 January 1953 in Canberra) is an Australian poet, novelist, short-fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of four published novels, four collections of short stories and five collections of poetry, and his work has won or been shortlisted for major prizes. Brooks is a highly intellectual writer, and his fiction has drawn frequent comparison with the writers Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. He studied poetics at the Australian National University (ANU) and in Toronto, Canada, from 1971 to 1986. He has been a hand-press printer of high-quality works, and was an editor of the Australian poetry journals New Poetry, Helix and Southerly. He taught literature at several Australian universities, followed by the Creative Writing program at Sydney University from 1999 to 2013. He is a long-term vegan, and writes extensively for and about animals and animal suffering. Early life