About John Mateer

John Mateer is a poet, born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and currently based in Perth, Australia. He has published books of poems in Australia, the UK and Austria, and booklets in South Africa, Australia, Sumatra, Japan, Macau and Portugal. His most recent collections are The West: Australian Poems 1989-2009, Ex-White: South African Poems, and Southern Barbarians, a book on vestiges of the Portuguese empire. Over the past ten years he has been a writer-in-residence in several countries, most recently in China, Portugal and Egypt, and he has read his work at many festivals. Presently he is working on a book that gathers together the poems of his experiences in various parts of Asia - Sumatra, Japan, Singapore and China.