Andrew Taylor

Andrew McDonald Taylor (born 19 March 1940) is an Australian poet and academic, and a co-founder of Friendly Street Poets in Adelaide, South Australia.

Early life and career Andrew Taylor was born in Warrnambool, Victoria on 19 March 1940. Educated at the University of Melbourne, Taylor moved to Adelaide in 1970, where he taught at the English Department at the University of Adelaide, mainly in American Literature.

He was a co-founder and the first chair of the South Australian Writers' Centre,

In 2005, Salt Publishing published Andrew Taylor's Collected Poems, bringing together his entire body of poetry, including new poems written between 2000 and 2003. A further collection, The Unhaunting was published in 2009. Although the bulk of Taylor's poems are relatively short lyrics or meditations, he has also been drawn to longer forms. The Crystal Absences, the Trout and Rome are each single book-length poems, and Parabolas is a collection of prose poems that broke new ground in Australia when first published. His critical study, Reading Australian Poetry was the first of its kind in Australia in many years.

From 2006 until 2009 he was the poetry editor for the Australian literary journal Westerly. He has been a member of the South Australian Arts Grants Advisory Committee, the Australian Society of Authors Management Committee and acting chairperson of the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

In 1990 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for "service to the Arts, particularly in the field of literature".

Selected works The Cool Change (1971) Ice Fishing (1973) The Invention of Fire (1976) The Cat's Chin and Ears (1976) Parabolas: Prose Poems (1976) The Crystal Absences, the Trout (1976) Number Two Friendly Street (co-editor with Ian Reid) (1978) Selected Poems (1960-1980) (1982) Travelling (1986) Reading Australian Poetry (1987) (criticism) Folds in the Map (1991) Sandstone (1995) Götterdämmerung Café (2001) Collected Poems (2004) Rome (2005) Regret about the Wolves and other poems (2006) The Unhaunting (2009) Impossibles Preludes (2016) Coogee Poems Plus (2021) Shore Lines (2023)