B. R. Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival and Director of Fringe Arts Collective Inc. a not-for-profit literary collective that organised the Brisbane Writers Fringe Festival (1993-1996) the Queensland Poetry Festival (1997-2001), The Arts Queensland Award for Unpublished Poetry (now the Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry) published the poetry broadsheet, Seriously Fishy, and ran literary events in Brisbane including Chalice Poets, With Baited Breath and The Word Made Flesh. He has an M.Phil. (Creative Writing) from The University of Queensland.
With poets Liz Hall-Downs and Sam Wagan Watson he wrote a sequence of poems, Boondall Cycle for the ‘Black Fellas White Fellas Wetlands’: Boondall Wetlands Website project (1996-1999, Brisbane Stories, Brisbane City Council). An audio CD of the poetry from the ‘Black Fellas, White Fellas Wetlands’ project was released in 2000. In 1999, he was awarded a New Work Grant from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council to write the verse novel, Universal Andalusia. He was a general poetry editor for Papertiger: New World Poetry CDROM from 2000-2006. Papertigermedia won the Queensland Writers’ Centre’s Johnno Award in 2002. He has also been awarded the 1998 Harri Jones Memorial Prize, the 2009 Max Harris Poetry Award, and the 2016 Paul Sherman Community Poetry Award.
Among his publications are 9 poetry collections – an artist’s book, The Barflies’ Chorus (1995), poetry books including Fatherlands (2000); Bacchanalia (2002), Bowra (2013), Weranga (2013), Critical State (2022), a verse novel Universal Andalusia (2006), and the poetry chapbooks The Negativity Bin (2010) and The Curious Noise of History (2011). Two further full -length poetry collections will be published in 2025 – Extinction Sonnets and The Eromanga Sea – for which he was a recipient of a 2023 Queensland Writers’ Fellowship from Arts Queensland, the State Library of Qld and the QWC.
Fatherlands was shortlisted in the 2002 Mary Gilmore Award. Bacchanalia won the inaugural IP Picks 2002 Poetry Award, Universal Andalusia was shortlisted in the 2006 C. J. Dennis Poetry Prize, and Bowra was the joint winner of the 2011 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize. His individual works have also attracted a range of shortlistings and wins, both nationally and internationally.
He was short-listed in the 2013 and 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize, teaches English & Literature, lives in Brisbane and in his spare time watches birds. In 2023 he was awarded a Queensland Writers’ Fellowship from Arts Queensland and the Queensland Writers’ Centre. His tenth poetry collection, Not for Heroics (Liquid Amber Press) is forthcoming in November 2026. His eleventh and twelfth poetry collections Extinction Sonnets (Walleah Press) and The Eromanga Sea (Calanthe Press) are forthcoming in 2027.
