Gregory Day

Gregory Day is an Australian novelist, poet, and musician.

Gregory Day
Born	Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Occupation	writer
Notable works	The Patron Saint of Eels, The Flash Road: Scenes From The Building Of The Great Ocean Road, Archipelago Of Souls
Notable awards	ALS Gold Medal, Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize
Years active	1990 —

Life

Gregory Day is a novelist, poet, and musician based in Victoria, Australia. He is well known for his Mangowak novels, which document generational, demographic, and environmental change on the 21st-century coast of southwest Victoria, Australia, and also for novels such as Archipelago of Souls and A Sand Archive, which explore the possibilities of finding the right balance between nature and culture through investigating the experience of the Australian character abroad. He has also been much acclaimed for his musical compositions and field recordings, notably his settings and singing of the poetry of William Butler Yeats on the album The Black Tower, and his project The Flash Road, which narrates, in a sung and highly choreographic style, the building of the Great Ocean Road in southwest Victoria in the years following The Great War.

Awards and nominations

• Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best First Book, 2006: The Patron Saint of Eels — shortlisted
• Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, 2006: The Patron Saint of Eels — winner
• New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, 2008: Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds: A Novel — shortlisted
• Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, 2011: The Neighbour's Beans — winner
• Manly Artist Book Award, 2017: A Smile at Arm's Length — winner
• Tasmanian Premier's Literary Prizes, Tasmania Book Prize, 2017: Archipelago of Souls — shortlisted
• Nature Conservancy, Australia Nature Writing Prize, 2019: Summer On The Painkalac — shortlisted
• Miles Franklin Award, 2019: A Sand Archive — shortlisted[1]
• Patrick White Literary Award, 2020 — winner[2]

Bibliography

Novels

• The Patron Saint of Eels (2005)
• Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds (2007)
• The Grand Hotel (2010)
• Archipelago of Souls (2015)
• A Sand Archive (2018)

Artist Book

• visitors - with Jiri Tibor Novak (2012)
• A Smile At Arm's Length — with Jiri Tibor Novak (2016)

Poetry

• Six Different Ways (1999) — with Kieran Carroll and Michael Farrell etc.
• Trace (in collaboration with photographer Robert Ashton) (2003)
• A Smile At Arm's Length (2016)

Music

• Untitled Red: No Evangelism (1992)
• Barroworn: Mangowak Days (1995)
• The Black Tower: Songs From The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1998)
• Trace soundtrack with Silver Ray (2003)
• The Flash Road: Scenes From The Building Of The Great Ocean Road (2005)
• The Ampliphones: Emotional Patterns of a New Climate (2015)

Personal Essays on Writing Fiction

• The Ocean Last Night*
• One True Note: The Meaning of Sound in the Language of Place"
• Otway Taenarum"

Interviews

• "ABC Radio National Books and Arts" July 2015
• "ABC Radio National Book Show" - 21 May 2008

Selected newspaper features and literary criticism

• Tabucchi's Marmalade In The Hotel Doma on Crete"
• Through The Prism Of Ancient Practice"
• Betraying The Loch"
• On Michael Schmidt's The Novel"
• The Submerged Moon - Nora Webster by Colm Toibin"
• Arthur Streeton In Lorne"
• To Know Calvino"
• Walter Benjamin A Critical Life"
• On Chris Andrews and Roberto Bolano"
• Song Of The Magpie"
• A Duty To Jenny"
• Pathways Of Cezanne and Morandi"
• Hovering Around A Tiny Island Paradise"

References

1. Boland, Michaela (2 July 2019). "'Try being a Leb': Author from Punchbowl shortlisted for Miles Franklin". ABC News. Retrieved 2 July 2019.
2. "Day wins Patrick White Literary Award". Books+Publishing. 30 November 2020. Retrieved 30 November 2020.