Australian born poet Richard James Allen has combined a unique international career as a writer, performer, choreographer and filmmaker. His award-winning films for his company ‘Physical TV’ have been shown at well over 200 international screen and dance festivals as well as on Australian, Slovenian, US and Chinese television. Richard has published seven books as a poet and performance writer and his writing has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and journals and in major Australian poetry anthologies, including The New Oxford Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Les A. Murray.
The recipient of numerous awards and nominations including two ATOM Awards and a NSW Premier’s Literary Awards shortlisting for his most recent book of poetry, Thursday’s Fictions, Dr Richard James Allen won the prestigious Chancellor’s Award for the most outstanding PhD thesis at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is the former Artistic Director of the Poets Union Inc., during which time conceived and directed the inaugural Australian Poetry Festival in 1999. He also conceived and co-edited the seminal anthology, Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts, which is used as a textbook in many university courses. Most recently Richard has been involved with cutting edge incursions into poetry and new media, in particular finding new spaces and platforms for literature on mobile phones and in 3D online immersive worlds.