Gray, Robert, 1945-...

Poet.

Poet and writer. Robert William Geoffrey Gray was born in Port Macquarie, New South Wales, in 1945. Gray worked as a journalist and bookseller and reviewed poetry for the Sydney morning herald. As a poet, Gray has published several collections including Creekwater journal (1974), Grass script (1979), The skylight (1984), New selected poems (1998), Grass script: selected earlier poems (2001) and Afterimages (2002). He has also edited volumes of selected poetry, including Sydney's poems: a selection on the occasion of the city's one hundred and fiftieth anniversary 1842-1992, with Vivian Smith (1992). Gray is the recipient of numerous awards. These include the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry in 1986 jointly for Selected poems 1963-1983, the Patrick White Award in 1990, and the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in 2002 for Afterimages. In 2008 Gray published a prose memoir of his father titled, The land I came through last, that won the Waverley Award for Literature, 2009.