Land Art

Stuart was born in 1980 and grew up in Sydney and Hobart. Even in the suburbs of Sydney, he was fortunate to grow up in homes that were always adjacent to large tracts of bush. This proximity to more-than-human worlds was the inspiration for his earliest poems, and was fed by his voracious reading of Australian poetry as a young writer—Robert Adamson, Michael Farrell, Robert Gray, Martin Harrison, Peter Minter, Les Murray, Jennifer Rankin and Judith Wright were all early, foundational influences.

Stuart completed his undergraduate studies at UTS, where he was supervised by Martin Harrison. He then obtained a PhD in Indigenous Australian and Chilean poetics at the ANU and Macquarie University, supervised by Deborah Bird Rose and Stephen Muecke. In between and during these studies he travelled widely, and lived in Argentina, Chile, England, Mexico, the Philippines and the United States.

Stuart moved to Queensland in 2012 to assume a position at Griffith University, where he lectures in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. He lived on the Gold Coast until 2019. He now lives in Brisbane, on Turrbal country.

In addition to his own poetry, Stuart has translated a wide variety of Latin American poets from Spanish and Portuguese, and he has also written extensive criticism on poetics, particularly with relation to environmental and Indigenous themes.