John Mateer Biography

John Mateer was born in Johannesburg. He spent his childhood in South Africa and Canada, and shortly before being conscripted moved with his parents and sisters to Australia. He travels frequently, often to Asia and

Europe.

When asked whether he feels he is Australian or South African, he usually

falls silent.

The novelist JM Coetzee, writing on his South African poems, states:

“Written from the rim of the far-flung South African diaspora, these poemsby Mateer roll back the tide of forgetting, giving us one glimpse after

another of a beloved homeland.” While the Australian critic Martin Harrison

has suggested that Mateer “is a poet who speaks towards the centre of

Australian culture.” And the Portuguese poet Manuel de Freitas, in a

review of the booklet The Travels/Viagens, sees that in the poems there

“is an “I” rightfully translated into the language, itself nomadic, of Camões,

Pessanha or Gil de Carvalho…”

Mateer’s poems have appeared in books in Australia, the UK and Austria,

and in ephemeral booklets in some of the places about which he has

written: South Africa, Australia, Japan, Sumatra, Macau and Portugal.

His most recent publications are The West: Australian Poems 1989-2009

(Fremantle Press), The Azanians (T41), Ex-White/Einmal Weiss: South

African Poems (Sisyphus Verlag), and the forthcoming Namban/Southern

Barbarians, poems about the Portuguese world (T41 and Giramondo).