The Australian poet, essayist, and literature teacher Mark Tredinnick was born in 1962 in Epping, New South Wales. He studied arts and law at the University of Sydney and took courses in philosophy. In his last year of his degree, he began working as an assistant for various law firms in Sydney. Shortly thereafter, he changed careers and worked at the Butterworths, Allen & Unwin, and HarperCollins publishing houses as an editor and publisher. After he had collected nearly ten years of experience with texts, Tredinnick began writing and teaching.
His first book, an edited collection of essays called »A Place on Earth« about Australia and North America, was published in 2003 while he was writing his dissertation. Various essay collections appeared over the next years, including »The Land’s Wild Music« (2005), in which Tredinnick, based on interviews with four well-known writers, examines their relationships with nature and how their writings focus on language and place. Publications such as »The Little Red Writing Book« (2006), »The Little Green Grammar Book« (2008) or »Writing Well« (2008) are dedicated to the art of writing. Tredinnick made his début as a poet in 2008 in audio form with the CD »The Road South«. Since 2010, he has released four poetry collections and published his lyrical texts in numerous anthologies and journals. His poems usually exhibit a carefully constructed, complex, and expansive syntax, exploring the formal borders of the genre with their driving linearity. For Tredinnick, poetry is created through the friction between sound and form. His influencers include poets such as John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Robert Gray, and Charles Wright, among others. References to art (van Gogh, Matisse) and music (Bach, Mozart, Debussy) can also be found in the melodious and visually striking poems in »Bluewren Cantos« (2013). In a kind of bucolic meditation, he celebrates the Australian landscape and the bird life near the Wingecarribee River, quotes Rumi, and explores his own existence as well as the survival function of poetry.
Tredinnick has received, among others, the Montreal Poetry Prize (2011), the Cardiff Poetry Prize (2012), and the Wildcare Nature Writing Prize (2005). He is a co-founder of ASLEC-ANZ, a creative association for the exploration of literature and the environment, as well as the Kangaloon group of writers, artists, and environmental scholars dedicated to topics such as climate change and ecological crises. Tredinnick lives near the Wingecarribee River southwest of Sydney.