Maria Takolander is a Finnish-Australian poet, fiction writer, essayist, and independent scholar. She is the author of four books of poetry: Trigger Warning (UQP 2021), which won a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award; The End of the World (Giramondo 2014), named a best book of the year in Australian Book Review and reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books; Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009), shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award; and the chapbook Narcissism (Whitmore Press, 2005). Her poems were selected for The Best Australian Poems and/or The Best Australian Poetry every year from 2005 until those anthologies ceased publication, and are represented in Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (2009), Thirty Australian Poets (2011), the Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (2014), Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016), #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement (2019), The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020), What We Carry: Poetry on Childbearing (2021), Homings and Departures: Selected Poems from Contemporary China and Australia (2021), and Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry (2021). Her poems have also been published internationally. Radio National aired a program about her poetry in 2015, and she has performed her poetry on TV and at the 2017 International Poetry Festival of Medellín, Colombia. Maria is also a prize-winning fiction writer and the author of The Double (and Other Stories) (Text 2013), short-listed for a Melbourne Prize for Literature.
Her website is mariatakolander.com