Andy Jackson
Andy Jackson is an award-winning poet, essayist, and creative writing lecturer at the University of Melbourne. His work, which frequently explores themes of difference and disability, has been published in numerous newspapers and literary journals, and he has been featured in multiple national and international writers festivals. He has published several poetry collections, including Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021) which won the Prime Ministers Literary Award for Poetry in 2022. This month, Jackson will release his latest poetry collection, Askew (Giramondo, 2026), which ruminates on a disabled world.
Jackson has been a key player in representing disabled voices in Australia’s poetry scene for many years. He has co-edited disability themed anthologies for Southerly (76.2, 2016) and the Australian Poetry Journal (9.2, 2020), and, in 2022, he won the inaugural Health Transformation Lab Fellowship at RMIT, which allowed him to facilitate a collaborative project with other disabled and neurodivergent writers, resulting in the 2024 anthology, “Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability.” Andy Jackson is, without question, a champion of disabled voices.
Click here to read his featured poem, “Extinction song.”
Tell us a bit about your background and your experience with Marfan Syndrome.
I was born in Bendigo, a regional Victorian city on Djaara country. Growing up, I knew little about the long history of the place. I also knew very little of my dad, who died when I was two, from complications due to Marfan Syndrome. My mother, suddenly a widow with two young children, didn’t dwell on our loss. She just kept going, went to teachers’ college, got work in primary schools, a pretty meagre income. When I hit puberty and my spine started to curve quite quickly and severely, I had multiple surgeries.
At the same time, some kids at school would call me names, treat me as a spectacle or as lesser. All those experiences had, I know now looking back, a huge impact on my sense of the precariousness and contingency of our lives, and the ways in which stigma works.
Have you always enjoyed writing poetry?
I think I always liked reading and writing. I don’t remember studying poetry at school. Poems kind of crept up on me. A friend invited me to go with her to open mic events, and I read some bits of writing which were vaguely poetic. I kept going after she drifted away, wrote more, listened to other poets, read more, enrolled in RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing program, started sending poems out to journals. So, becoming a poet was incremental, and really only possible because other people saw me as a poet, or at least a potential poet, and supported my attempts.
How has your poetry developed over the years?
Others might be better placed to answer this than me – there’s always blind spots looking at things so close – but my sense is that the poems have increasingly become more interested in form and in how the shape and structure of a poem amplifies the body behind the voice, or the bodily impact on the reader. They’re more layered, complex, I suppose. The themes, though, are roughly the same – otherness, embodiment, belonging, relatedness, meaning, the forces that shape us and how poems might resist dehumanisation.
“But the reality is that there’s no escape. The only way out is through, to try (in some small way) to unsettle the old tropes.”
Have there been any challenges you have had to face in order to share your poetry?
The hurdles I’ve had to surmount to write about disability and deformity have been mostly internal, really. Which, of course, is also external. A sense of shame, i.e., internalised ableism, amplifies self-consciousness, the inclination to be quiet, disappear. Which is understandable. When you get attention for your difference, you don’t want to attract more of it. But the reality is that there’s no escape. The only way out is through, to try (in some small way) to unsettle the old tropes. When I first started writing about my bodily experience, I wasn’t aware of much disability poetry. That in itself was actually an encouragement. Now there’s so many brilliant – and diverse – voices out there. It’s liberating on many levels.
Who were your biggest creative inspirations?
Over the years, I think the biggest influences on my writing have been Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, for the ways in which they expand experience into compelling and disorienting sound and affect, for how they reach beyond the individual into myth and history, always with an ethical questing and rigour. That’s the kind of poetry that most holds my attention – where there’s something at stake, where there’s an intimacy that feels organic and enlivening. Recently, I’ve loved books by Rachael Boast, Brian Teare, Kobus Moolman and Luke Patterson.
In your previous poetry collection, Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021), you wrote poems inspired by mythology, history, works of fiction, and artworks capturing deformity. Have any of these poems stuck with you more than others?
I always have a soft spot for those poems that seemed to surprise me as I was writing them, or as they took shape. “Formity” was one of those. I wove together lines from William Hay’s 1754 essay called “Deformity” with lines of my own. This felt like a breakthrough in terms of its form, but also the way the form allowed for a kind of singing together across time. The problems I encounter in writing poems are almost always about form and voice, the practical and aural dilemmas. But I do keep trying to find new ways of speaking into that really complex space of embodied difference. Ableism is one of the most under-thought discriminations, but very much tied up with the others. I like to think my poems gesture towards the idea that disability is both a distinct experiential identity and a porous, unifying human dimension.
Tell us about your latest collection, Askew (Giramondo, 2026).
This book resulted from life experience rather than any conscious attempt to write about the multiple overlapping crises of ecology and dialogue we’re flailing around in. The themes in Askew were very much things on my mind that had to be written into and through and with. The challenge was how to do it without ideological stridency, how to write poems with some kind of musicality and dark beauty, how to find the forms that might unearth the language I was searching for. In a way, Askew is innovative in its forms – I have a few in there that I’ve invented, as well as some older forms I’ve adapted. Others have written into this fraught space of crisis, and I know many more will do so.
Are you working on any new projects?
I’m slowly building up a collection of essays, and I’m already writing new poems. But mostly, it’s time to rest, recuperate, take stock, read, be human.
What inspired you to write “Extinction song”?
“Extinction Song” is one of the poems in the book I call an “aftersong”. It’s a form I invented that’s a bit like a terminal, and I found it really stimulating to work with. Essentially, in aftersongs, the last word of each line is taken from the track titles of an album by a recently deceased musician or composer. The poems aren’t about these people, but they do try to move with some of their energy, I suppose. This one responds to Ryuichi Sakamoto, but it’s essentially about grief, both recent and anticipated, the vulnerability we all carry, especially these days. It wants to persist through crisis, wonders how, doesn’t have the answers, except perhaps in what grief implies, which is love and interconnectedness.
Over your lifetime, how has the literary scene changed for people with a disability?
There are so many more opportunities for disabled poets now than when I first started writing. There are specific literary journals – Sunder and Bramble (and now this one!) here in Australia, Wordgathering and Breath & Shadow and Sick Magazine in the USA; there are plenty of others I’ve missed in other jurisdictions. Lots of journals have special editions where the theme is related to disability or adjacent to it in some way. Opportunities include residencies at Varuna, open mic events via Red Room, grants through Creative Australia. Publishers, too, are more open than they used to be. The cultural conversation has shifted and widened (though, of course, it has a long way to go).
“For me, poetry is always about some kind of community.”
What advice would you give to people in the disabled community who are interested in pursuing poetry but don’t know where to start?
For me, poetry is always about some kind of community. There are journals, social media gatherings, initiatives and grants, etc., which are especially for disabled writers. Send your work out, find people to workshop with, write what you need to write, and read widely so as to build your own personal canon. Each step shapes the placement of the next step.
In 2018, you published your PhD thesis, “Disabling Poetics: Bodily Otherness and the Saying of Poetry,” which won a Doctoral Thesis Medal from the University of Adelaide. How might your research impact the community?
Strangely or not, I haven’t thought too much about the intended impact on the disability community, apart from knowing intuitively that honesty, exploration, and humanness in poems can be encouraging, especially when it’s bodily in its focus and impact (it is for me). I think I most likely imagine all sorts of people reading Human Looking. Whoever they are, I hope they recognise that encountering other people – especially people whose lives are weighed down with cultural myths – is a complex process of listening, being aware of the limits and distortions of their own knowledge, and taking seriously the relatedness that is at the heart of being human. I also aim to use poetic form to mirror the imperfections and uncanny familiarity and otherness of people.
What led you to become a creative writing lecturer at the University of Melbourne?
I’ve worked at a legal publisher, in the public service, in call centres, in cafes (including one I co-owned and operated as a venue) and libraries. After finishing my PhD in 2019, I worked at three different universities on contract, as well as running online workshops, mentoring, and other freelance work. That life has its advantages, but, for me anyway, it was unsustainable. It was very difficult to align the demands with my own limited energies. Positions at [the University of] Melbourne were being advertised; I thought I had little chance, but applied anyway; and they took me on part-time (again, a surprise, but so welcome).
If you could give a young Andy any piece of advice, what would you tell him?
The younger me would no doubt be sceptical about a middle-aged version of himself telling him what to do. He has to make his own mistakes, blunder through, feel bewilderment and lostness – I can’t protect him. I’m just glad that somehow he trusted that quiet intuition that writing and speaking (and listening/reading) are worth it.
“I hope they recognise that encountering other people – especially people whose lives are weighed down with cultural myths – is a complex process of listening, being aware of the limits and distortions of their own knowledge, and taking seriously the relatedness that is at the heart of being human.“
Post published 01/10/26
Article by Jacqueline Collier
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