Chris Wallace-Crabbe

In May 2014, Wallace-Crabbe alluded to the possibility of a collaboration with a Melbourne writer, Christopher Bantick, however, he is currently working on the history of Western magic, and on a series of prints, with Kristin Headlam, based upon his long poem mentioned above.

Over the next decades he became a reader in English and then held a personal chair from 1988. On the initiative of H. C. Coombs, he was a Harkness Fellow at Yale University from 1965 to 1967, mixing widely with American writers and developing his poetry in new directions. In later years he has spent time in Italy, reading and translating Italian verse, including two contrast cantos from Dante. He was also a member of the Psychosocial Group, an occasional body with psychoanalytic as well as cultural interests.

Wallace-Crabbe's early collections were published in Australia, but in 1985 he began to publish with Oxford University Press, reaching an international public. Although he published some of his criticism and his one novel elsewhere, he remained with Oxford until 1998, after which date the Press ceased publishing live poets. He then took his work to Carcanet Oxford Poets, in Manchester. Back in Australia he brought out two books with the Sydney firm of Brandl & Schlesinger. One of these was a highly experimental long poem, or "zany epic", on which he had been working for a dozen years. It would be fair to say that this dense and difficult poem divided the poet's readers.

After leaving school, Wallace-Crabbe set out to be a metallurgist, but was drawn back to his childhood interest in books and art. After training in the Royal Australian Air Force, he worked as an electrical trade journalist while studying for his B.A. in the evenings. He published his first book of poetry while doing his final honours year. In 1961 he became Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Christopher Keith Wallace-Crabbe AM (born 6 May 1934) is an Australian poet and emeritus professor in the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne.