Pam Brown
Photo courtesy the author

Pam Brown Contents page

Pam Brown (b.1948) was born in Victoria, and grew up on military bases in Toowoomba and Brisbane. She has earned a living variously as a librarian, nurse, publisher’s assistant, postal worker, artworker and a teacher of writing, multi-media studies and film-making. Since 1968 she has lived mostly in Sydney, and travels frequently. She has published fourteen books of poetry and prose, and from 1997 to 2002 was the poetry editor for Overland magazine. In 2004 she became Associate Editor of Jacket magazine at http://jacketmagazine.com/. Pam also has an Author Notes page in Jacket magazine, which repeats some of this material below and also gives direct links to several poems, interviews and reviews relating to her writing in that magazine.

Longer biographical note

Pam Brown was born in Seymour, Victoria in 1948. Eighteen months later, her mother contracted tuberculosis and her father’s military commitments took him overseas, so Pam spent her formative years in the care of a great-aunt and uncle. She rejoined her family at the age of seven and grew up on military bases in Toowoomba and Brisbane in Queensland. After finishing high school at Mitchelton in 1965 she didn’t know what she wanted to do. She got a job in the external studies library at the University of Queensland and, inadvertently, set out to become a librarian. That career was short-lived and since then she has earned a living variously as a silkscreen printer, bookseller, nurse, publisher’s assistant, postal worker, artworker and a teacher of writing, multi-media studies and film-making. In 1990, serendipitously, she returned to library work in the life sciences library at the University of Sydney where she is currently employed. She has also been a rock musician and a short film and video maker.

Since 1968 she has lived mostly in Sydney with stints in Melbourne, the Macdonald Valley, the Blue and Dandenong Mountains and Adelaide where she worked for eighteen months at the Experimental Art Foundation. In 2003 she spent six months living in Trastevere, Rome in the Australian poets’ studio.

She has travelled to Asia, Europe and the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.

In the 1970s and 80s, like many of her generation, she engaged in left-wing and feminist political activity.

Since 1966, her poetry has been published in many journals both in Australia and internationally. Since 1971 she has published fourteen books of poetry & prose. She has also written reviews, essays, filmscripts & performance texts. In 1991 she used Australian poetry in assisting English teaching in Hanoi, Vietnam. In 1993 Pam Brown was a guest at the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie in Paris, France and at the inaugural International Literature Festival in Berlin in August 2001. In 2003 she was a guest at the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, Spain.

She edited four poetry chapbooks in the Rare Object Series for Vagabond Press, Sydney in 2001. For five years, from 1997-2002, she was the poetry editor for the Australian literary quarterly Overland magazine. She is a contributing editor to the U.S.-based annual of poetry and poetics Fulcrum and the international online journal How2.

The URL address of this page is
http://www.austlit.com/a/brown-p/index.html