Mark Tredinnick is a poet, essayist and writing teacher; he lives in Burradoo, in the highlands southwest of Sydney in Australia’s southeast. His books include The Little Red Writing Book (published in the United States and the United Kingdom as Writing Well: the Essential Guide), The Land’s Wild Music and A Place on Earth. The Little Green Grammar Book is published by UNSW Press in Australia in September 2008; The Blue Plateau—a landscape memoir on which he has been at work for some years—appears in Australia in May 2009 (UQP) and in the US in October 2009 (Milkweed Editions). Mark is working on a volume of poems and a book about the consolations of literature in a frantic age.

In recent years, in addition to his own books, Mark has edited a number of collections of Australian writing, some of it with a landscape focus, each published as a special issue of a literary journal: Where Waters Meet (Manoa18:2, with Larissa Behrendt and Barry Lopez), Watermarks (Southerly 64:2, with Nicolette Stasko), and Being True to the Earth (PAN 4, with Kate Rigby). 

Mark’s writing has appeared in Best Australian Essays, Island, Manoa, Mascara, Orion, PAN, Southerly and other journals and newspapers; his essays, criticism and poems have been published in chapbooks and anthologies, and he writes regularly for The Bulletin. Mark’s honours include the Newcastle Poetry Prize(2007), the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2005), The Calibre Essay Prize (2008), and the Wildcare Nature Writing Prize (2005), shortlistings in the ABR, Broadway and other poetry and essay prizes, and residencies in Hawaii with the Pacific Writers’ Network, at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and at the Camden Haven Pilot Station, a nature writing centre on the New South Wales coast. Mark talks and teaches widely on writing, landscape, justice and ecology. For over a decade he has run writing programs at the University of Sydney and at writers’ centres in Australia and the United States. He runs them these days, too, in his cowshed in Burradoo. He mentors aspiring writers, and now and then he edits a manuscript in need of help. He teaches grammar and composition, and he consults, on writing matters, with clients in business and government

For ten years, before all that, Mark was a book editor and publisher. Once upon a time he was a lawyer.

Mark holds a doctorate in literature and ecology, and in 2003 he co-founded ASLE-ANZ (the Association for the Study of Literature & Environment–ANZ).

After a childhood and education had in suburban Sydney, Mark lived for many years in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, terrain he explores in The Blue Plateau and a number of his essays and poems. For a time he lived at Lavender Bay by Sydney Harbour and at Glebe and Annandale in the city’s inner west. He has travelled widely in the United States of America, and has written often about American literature and landscapes. Much of his work is published in the US; he has read at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Oregon and elsewhere. In March 2007, Mark moved with his young family to “Nettlebed”, a farmhouse near the Wingecarribee River, one hundred and twenty kilometers southwest of Sydney.