Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne in 1949 and lives in Brisbane. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry in Australia, as well as a volume of cultural history "Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901-1939" (2001). "The Ash Range," originally published by Picador Australia in Sydney in 1987, won the Victorian Premier's New Writing Award that year, and is a major milestone in the author's career. The book is a long work that mixes prose, poetry, reportage and illustrations - somewhat in the manner of William Carlos Williams' "Paterson" - to narrate a history...

'Crab & Winkle' is a warped Shepherd's Calendar for the age of climate change: a journal of Australian poet Laurie Duggan's first year as a resident in England, it centres specifically on the area of East Kent where he lives, featuring excursions and interludes elsewhere in Britain, the Continent and North Africa. The book's title comes from an old railway route in the heart of Duggan's new territory.

The Pursuit of Happiness collects shorter poems written during and after the composition of Crab & Winkle, and concludes with 'The Nathan Papers', an earlier and longer work written in Australia. The poems address the state of the art and the state of the nation, investigating the spaces left for pleasure in this new dark age.

"The small poems . . . slowly build up to a much larger narrative; a narrative of time and memory, of thinking and looking and being in the world, a kind of history that is happening on the sidelines." - Fiona Wright "Sceptical as I am about anti-poetry, of which there is a lot around and which can assume many different forms, the fully formed poems are not the only writing I can value in a book like this. There is too much wit, absurdity, and sheer verbal craft to be ignored." -Peter Riley"