Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett is an award-winning poet and critic living on Wangal land. Her books are A Kinder Sea (UQP), Vanishing Point (UQP) and Seastrands (Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects series). She edited the collection Thirty Australian Poets (UQP). Felicity has a PhD from the University of Sydney and is a widely-published reviewer and essayist. She is Poetry Editor with Australian Book Review and teaches poetry masterclasses with Varuna, the National Writers’ House. She was awarded the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize in 2026.

Photo Credit: Simona Janek

Works By Felicity Plunkett

Wire, Knife, Shovel, Laurel
With Australia’s Poet Laureate soon to be announced, Felicity Plunkett revisits the topoi for envisaging poetic community. Inspired by Terrance Hayes and others, she asks: what resources, imaginative or otherwise, are needed for poetry to thrive?
23 Oct. 2026
Plath Traps
Biographies juxtapose competing views of particular events, moments and aspects of Plath’s life. Red Comet, over a thousand pages, takes in all the other Plath biographies before it. Scholarship is meant to work like this, as is legal precedent.
27 Mar. 2022
Trust Me
‘This novel haunts crossing spaces, the liminal zones of libraries’ public privacies (laundering, humming, existential despair), hallways and elevators. And many of us are reading Weather in locked-down homes without much sense of what might happe...
20 July. 2020
True to Form: A.E. Stallings, Jenny Xie, Ada Limón
Form can figure as a room you enter or you don’t, usually a very small room, if not the smallest, imagined as staid and stultifying, or worse, suffocating.
30 Oct. 2019
To Resilience – and Beyond!
In Li’s, Friedmann’s and Febos’ work, the polyvocal I draws together facets of self and subjectivity, braiding them, while unbraiding simpler notions of a singular, truthful I. As reticence and disclosure speak together, or loss and hope, or the I...
4 June. 2018
Feral with vulnerability: Nelson, O’Shaughnessy and Mann
‘The vulnerable state of speaking ‘freely, copiously, and passionately’, as Nelson writes, demands the unsettling of anything fixed. The freedom to craft, from this unsettlement – from the tilt of failure and into whatever must fall, between what
15 Sept. 2016
Second Murders: Report from the Interior by Paul Auster
In Report from the Interior, Auster describes the impact of his Jewishness on his remembering and subjectivity. He stands apart from the typical American boy he has hitherto imagined himself to be. His younger self does not attempt to resist this
13 June. 2014
Angela will be livid: In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame
In the Memorial Room is both literally and figuratively posthumous. It centres around themes of creativity, being a writer, and a writer’s posthumous memorialisation. Frame wrote the novel in 1973, but did not allow its publication during her lif...
7 June. 2013
The archeology of memory: Hannah and Emil
Belinda Castles Hannah and Emil is prefaced by the story of Flora, a newly-pregnant Sydneysider. Flora receives a parcel containing a bequest...
19 Feb. 2013

Works Featuring Felicity Plunkett

A Break That Can Be Bridged
Since I started work on this review, I’ve resisted turning it into an essay about the kindness movement. Felicity Plunkett’s poetry deserves our full attention. But the book is called A Kinder Sea, and as I’ve been reading and re-reading these poe...
2 Apr. 2020