Michael Wilding (writer) - Life

Life

Michael Wilding, novelist and critic, was born in Worcester UK and read English at Oxford. He has taught English and Australian Literature and creative writing at the University of Sydney, where he is now emeritus professor, the University of Birmingham, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the National University of Singapore. He has also been a milkman, postman, apple-picker, newspaper columnist, Cosmopolitan Bachelor of the Month, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Chair of the New South Wales Writers' Centre. He has been translated and published in some 20 countries. His papers and manuscripts are held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. His correspondence with Christina Stead is in the National Library of Australia. There are portraits of him by Edgar Billingham and by Dimitri Lihachov in private collections. Central Independent Television UK made a documentary on his writing, Reading the Signs. For many years he was Australian editor of Stand, the UK quarterly edited by Jon Silkin and Lorna Tracy, introducing the work of Robert Adamson, Peter Carey, and Vicki Viidikas to the UK. Wilding was a founding editor of the University of Queensland Press's Asian & Pacific Writing series (20 volumes), the innovative short story magazine, Tabloid Story with Frank Moorhouse and Carmel Kelly, and of the publishers Wild & Woolley (with Pat Woolley), and Paperbark Press (with the poet Robert Adamson).