David Brooks in conversation

About our guest

Join us for an evening of poetry and conversation with renowned Australian poet David Brooks. David Brooks has published six collections of poetry. His latest, The Peanut Vendor, a sequence of forty-eight luminous new poems appears in his New and Selected volume The Other Side of Daylight.  

Wise, lyrical and resonant, The Other Side of Daylight distils a long and honoured poetry career with a marvelous selection from his five previous volumes. The Other Side of Daylight was awarded the 2025 Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, and Brooks is also the recipient of the 2025 Patrick White Award. 
 
An advocate for animals and animal rights, David Brooks lives in the Blue Mountains with rescued sheep.

David will be joined by host Michael Crane, who will read poems from his latest book, Urban & landscape/ Ordinary lives.

Copies of David's books will be available to purchase on the night.

About the book

A bottle of Romanee-Conti sells for $785,000, while bodies are dug by hand from earthquake rubble in Indonesia because the local government couldn't afford the earthmoving equipment to do so while people were still alive. Elephants are shot and skinned by poachers and remote Indigenous communities are shut down for want of infrastructural funding. And with tenderness and humility, a simple gift of peanuts to magpies, sheep and a tentative rat reframes the place of the human in the world. 

David Brooks's longstanding concerns for justice and the relationship between human and non-human animals infuse and enliven his work.