A. G. Pettet is an Australian writer, editor and academic. He taught Creative Writing at Griffith University and serves as Secretary of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Inc.
He is the author of two poetry collections, with work published nationally and internationally in journals and anthologies including Oxford Poetry, Antipodes – the official journal of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies, The Australian Poetry Anthology, World Literature Today and Dazed & Confused Magazine.
Pettet has performed, chaired and appeared on panels at major literary events including Brisbane Writers Festival, the National Young Writers Festival and Queensland Poetry Festival, where he served as Assistant Director from 1997 to 2000. He was also cofounder and senior editor of Bareknuckle Books, where he edited four poetry collections, two anthologies, one of which was named among The Australian’s Books of the Year, and a short story collection by award-winning author Venero Armanno. A. G. Pettet is currently represented by Australian Literary Management.
“Adam Pettet is a noted and talented poet as well as being one of the foremost worldwide historians of the Beat Generation.
Australian poets have often seen experimentation alone as making them global, or as cosmopolitanism alone making them experimental, Pettet is aware that one has to be both, on more or less separate axes, and then braid those two tendencies into an articulated whole.
Pettet has not only done this but has crystallized these tendencies into an art that is concise, eloquent, and has the self-belief of a poetry that is not just lyricized discursivity but has a pulse of its own.
Pettet’s writing recalls us (as Christopher Brennan might put it) to the source of poetry, in deep feeling and an insistence that the precision of words makes us think in a distinctly poetic but nonetheless cerebral way. Of Pettet’s generation, I think David Musgrave and Felicity Plunkett are achieving these effects as well, although Pettet does the job with particular economy and conviction.”
– Nicholas Birns (New York University) Author of ‘Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead’