Photo © Jaya Savige, British Library, London, Oct 2023
Jaya Savige is an Australian poet, writer, editor and critic currently living in London. He is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Change Machine (2020), which was a Book of the Year for the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review, Weekend Australian and ABC Radio National’s Bookshelf, & was shortlisted for the 2021 Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, the QLA Judith Wright Calanthe Prize and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance. His essays and reviews have appeared throughout Australia and abroad in the Times Literary Supplement, London Magazine and Poetry (Chicago). Jaya is the long-standing poetry editor for The Australian newspaper (2010-), for which he has selected over 500 poems.
Jaya is represented in the UK by Peter Straus @ RCW Literary Agency.
Born in Sydney 1978 to an Indonesian father and an Anglo-Celtic Australian mother, Jaya grew up on Bribie Island in Moreton Bay, and in Brisbane / Meanjin, Queensland. After quitting Law at university he won the University Medal for a first-class BA, and gained an MPhil from the University of Queensland. He received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to read for a PhD in English at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. From 2013-2021 he was Assistant Professor of English and Head of Creative Writing at Northeastern University, London, and is still recovering. Jaya recently wrote the final two chapters of the Cambridge History of Australian Poetry (2024).
Jaya’s first poetry collection, latecomers (UQP 2005), won the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was Highly Commended for the Dame Mary Gilmore Prize and shortlisted for several other awards. His second volume, Surface to Air (UQP 2011), was shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the West Australian Premier’s Prize.
Poems of Jaya’s can be found in The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, Poetry International, Contemporary Australian Poetry, Thirty Australian Poets and in nine editions of the annual Best Australian Poems, and in magazines and journals such as Poetry Review, London Magazine and PN Review (UK), Kenyon Review, Jacket2, POETRY (Chicago) and Poetry Daily (USA), Poesia (Italy) and throughout Australia in Cordite Review, Marrickville Pause, Meanjin, Overland, Rabbit, Southerly, Stilts and more. He has given given readings in Bali, Berlin, Brisbane, Cambridge, Düsseldorf, London, Melbourne, Milan, New York, Prague, Turin, Sydney and Verona. He has been the recipient of a Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship for Poetry, a Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Artist Fellowship, and of Creative Australia writing residencies at the B.R. Whiting Library Studio, Rome, and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.