John Blight: Contents page

John Blight (1913–95) was born at Unley in South Australia. He tramped the roads in the Depression and finally found work as an accountant in Queensland where he spent most of his life. He retired in the early 1970s and devoted the rest of his life to writing. In 1939, his poems were first published in the Bulletin. His first collection of poems was The Old Pianist (1945). His Selected Poems won the National Book Council prize in 1976. University of Queensland Press published Holiday Sea Sonnets (1988) and Selected Poems: 1939–1990 (1992). He was also awarded the 1964 Myer award, with A Beachcomber’s Diary winning the best Australian book of verse; the Dame Mary Gilmore medal (1965), the Patrick White award for Selected Poems 1939–1975 (1976), The Grace Leven prize (1977), the Christopher Brennan award (1980) and an order of merit for services to literature in 1987. He wrote hundreds of sonnets, many about the sea and the Queensland coast, the best known of which is ‘Death of a Whale’.