Andrew Sant

Andrew Sant (born 1950) is an English-born Australian poet, essayist, and former editor.[1]

Andrew Sant

In 1962 Sant moved from London, where he was born, with his family to Melbourne where he finished his formal education. He has since lived in London for periods, particularly between the years 2002–2016. In 2001 he was resident at the University of Peking in Beijing, China. In the early nineties he was resident in the Australia Council-administered B R Whiting studio in Rome.

He co-founded, in 1979, the major Australian literary magazine, Island, based in Tasmania, where by that time he had moved. He served as an editor for ten years. Other occupations have included teaching at both secondary and tertiary levels, teaching literacy to the unemployed and to prisoners, managing a hostel for juvenile offenders, copywriting and, as part-owner of a small Tasmanian company, cider making.

His most recent poetry collections include Tremors: New & Selected Poems (2004), Speed & Other Liberties (2008), Fuel (2009) The Bicycle Thief & Other Poems (2013) and Baffling Gravity (2019). His poems have appeared individually in The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Poetry London, The Australian, The Age, and Antipodes, among many other publications, and in major anthologies of Australian poetry. Sant has been described as a "distinctive and distinguished poet" in Australian Book Review. He is also the author of a number of published essays which have appeared in the annual Best Australian Essays anthology and collected in How to Proceed of which The Times Literary Supplement said, "There is a wonderfully digressive quality ... His syntax follows suit: sentences balloon across lines, the subject weaving in and out of focus as his mind travels around it. There are moments of sparkling poetic clarity." He is a recipient of the Centenary Medal.[2] Sant has been invited to read his work in numerous countries including Canada, Germany, Italy, Sweden, New Zealand and, often, the UK.