Mark Tredinnick, author of The Blue Plateau, is an award-winning poet and essayist. He lives in the highlands southwest of Sydney, Australia.

As well as The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir—published in Australia (UNSW Press) and North America (Milkweed) in 2010—Mark is the author of The Road South (poems on CD), The Little Green Grammar Book, The Little Red Writing Book (published outside Australia as Writing Well: the Essential Guide), The Land’s Wild Music , A Place on Earth, and, with Geoff Whyte, The Little Black Book of Business Writing.

Mark’s honours include the Blake Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize (runner up), the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Calibre Essay Prize, and the Wildcare Nature Writing Prize. His work has been anthologised and published widely in Australian and the US journals. His poems have appeared in The Best Australian Poems; his prose in The Best Australian Essays.

In October 2010, Mark’s first book of poems will be published by Puncher & Wattmann. Meantime, you can read about Mark’s poems and hear Mark reading some of them in the Poetry Archive: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=12219

Mark is now at work on a second book of poems, a novel and a memoir of the reading life and the the consolations of literature in a frantic age.

Mark’s poems and essays have appeared in Blue Dog, Indigo, Island, Isotope, Kunapipi, Manoa, Mascara, Meanjin, Orion, PAN, Southerly, Snorkel, The Grove, The Sun-Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, Wet Ink, World Literature Today, and other journals and newspapers; he writes regularly for newspapers including The Australian, The Sun-Herald, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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 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).

With Deborah Bird Rose, Freya Mathews, Kate Rigby, Roland Hemmert and others, Mark has recently founded The Kangaloon Group—a fellowship of writers, artists an scholars in the eco-humanities. The group is dedicated, as a loose federation of artisans, artists and thinkers, to finding words and other artistic forms to celebrate beauty and engender hope and animate love in this time of climate change, impending ecological crisis and mass extinctions.

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.