M. T. C. Cronin

M. T. C. Cronin (born 1963) is a contemporary Australian poet. MTC Cronin has published twenty books (poetry, prose poems and essays) including a collection jointly written with the Australian poet, Peter Boyle. Her work has won and been shortlisted for many major literary awards, both internationally and in her native Australia, including the Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize, the Stand International Poetry Prize, the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Artsrush Poetry Prize and the James Joyce Foundation’s Suspended Sentence Award. She has been twice nominated for one of North America’s most prestigious literary awards, the Pushcart Prize, and in Australia her books have received numerous accolades (see publication list below). Several of her books have appeared in translation: The Ridiculous Shape of Longing (Macedonian) and Talking to Neruda’s Questions, which has been translated into Spanish, Italian and Swedish. Other individual translations of her work have been into Bengali, Mandarin, French, Italian, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Russian, Swedish, Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, Austrian and German. Her book of prose poems, God is Waiting in the World’s Yard (Puncher & Wattmann, Sydney), is forthcoming in 2019. Cronin has studied arts (double major in political science), law (first class honours), literature (masters degree) and creative writing (masters degree). After being employed for most of the decade of the eighties in the hospitality and cleaning industries and for the decade of the nineties in law, she has in recent years taught literature and creative writing and hosted workshops at primary and secondary schools, universities and writers’ centres. Her poetry has been set in texts in numerous schools and at tertiary level in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Departments of Law, English and Writing, for example at UNSW, the University of Sydney, the University of Kansas, the University of Nebraska, the Univ