Paul Dawson

Paul Dawson (born 1972) is an Australian writer of poetry and fiction and a scholar in the fields of narrative theory and the study of creative writing. He is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in the School of the Arts and Media. He teaches creative Writing (including play writing), literary theory, North American Literature, and British and Irish Literature. Career Dawson holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and an MA in Writing from the University of Queensland. His first book of poems is entitled Imagining Winter; it was published by Interactive Press in 2006. This book garnered the 2006 national IP Picks Best Poetry Award. His book on the rise and spread of creative writing programs, Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005) has been called a "...thorough and perceptive account of this history and [its] debates". Dawson has been invited to provide commentary on popular culture. He has participated in various literary festivals and panels. In 2014, he was a visiting scholar at Aarhus University in Denmark. Dawson was part of the university's narrative research lab, a project which investigates "...narrative in various media and art forms; its forms, techniques and voices, its cross medial potential and its relations to different cultural discourses." His poems have appeared in anthologies such as Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann, 2013), The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology (2016), and Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1788-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). He has published short stories and poems in journals and newspapers, including: Meanjin, Island, Southerly, Overland, Australian Poetry Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Snorkel, Slope (a US journal), Australian Poetry Anthology, The Sleeper's Almanac, Blue Dog: Australian Poetry, Imago: New Writing, and The Sydney Morning Herald.