“Earl is a teacher with an exemplary depth of knowledge who encourages his students to aim for and reach their potential.”
Graham Adair
Earl Livings
I was born and educated in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. On my way to a career as a writer, I played guitar in a garage band, gained a black belt in kung fu, studied theoretical physics, then worked as a statistician, a productivity manager in a factory, and a university administrator.
I started my writing career as a SF & Fantasy writer, then fell in love with poetry and devoted myself to it for over a decade. During this period, I wrote it, edited it, studied it at university, and published it. But the narrative urge persisted and I went back to writing prose fiction.
For my MA, I wrote an experimental autobiographical novel of prose and poetry, while for my PhD I wrote a fantasy verse novel. I taught poetry, fiction, editing and myths & symbols at tertiary level and was the editor of Divan, Australia’s first online poetry journal, from 1999 to 2013.
I have published literary and speculative poetry and fiction in Australia and in Britain, Canada, the USA, and Germany, and have read my work locally and overseas. In 2005, I won the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition. I have also published two books of poetry, Further than Night (Bystander Press, 2000) and Libation (Ginninderra Press, 2018).
My work in prose and poetry concentrates on science, history, nature, mythology and the sacred, with a particular emphasis on Welsh and Celtic materials, as this aligns with my heritage and my sense of identity.
Some of the poets and writers who have influenced me in some way include William Blake, Keats, Shelley, W B Yeats, Robert Graves, Kathleen Raine, Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E Howard, J R R Tolkien, Hermann Hesse, Roger Zelazny, Karl Edward Wagner, M John Harrison, Robert Holdstock, Terry Dowling, Ursula Le Guin, Alan Garner, and Robert MacFarlane.
I am currently writing a fantasy novel about the historical Merlin and am developing a poetry manuscript exploring my interests in the sacred and those historical and familial influences on my life and my work.
