Adrian Caesar
Sky Writing, with artworks by Kat Rae
Recent Work Press, 2026
In the voices of a brother and sister, the poems in Sky Writing tell of a tragic love story from different perspectives. The life of an RAF pilot, friend to the brother, lover to the sister, comes to a premature end in a flying accident. The poems explore the collision of romantic love with the doomed romance of military service and provide an elegiac refrain for both.
Kat Rae’s artistic response to the poems expands and enhances their significance, providing a vivid and thought-provoking complementary visual experience.
Taken together, the poems and images create an alternative memorial to more traditional modes of remembrance.
About the Author
Adrian Caesar was born in Manchester and educated in England at state grammar schools and the University of Reading. He completed a PhD in 1981 when there were very few jobs in Higher Education due to Margaret Thatcher’s education cuts. As a result, he applied for jobs all over the world and was lucky enough to secure a Post-Doctoral fellowship in Humanities at the Flinders University of South Australia. During this two-year appointment, Adrian met Claire and they married in 1984.
Following a tutorship at the University of New England in Armidale, Adrian was appointed to a lectureship at the University of New South Wales @ADFA in Canberra where he worked for fifteen years and was promoted to Associate Professor. When the English Department was reduced by half following cuts to funding by the Department of Defence, Adrian took a voluntary redundancy in order to concentrate on his writing. At the same time, he was awarded a two-year senior writer’s grant by the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Subsequently he taught creative writing part-time at the Australian National University. He now writes full-time and lives on the far south coast of New South Wales in Bateman’s Bay.
Adrian Caesar has published six books of poems, the latest of which is, This Cathedral Grief (Recent Work Press, 2020). He is also the author of several books of literary criticism and a non-fiction novel, The White, which won the Nettie Palmer Prize for non-fiction in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2000 and the ACT Book of the Year, 2000. His novel, The Blessing, (Arcadia, 2015) was long-listed for the Voss Award in 2016.
About the Artist
Kat Rae served in the Australian Regular Army for 20 years, during which she deployed to the Middle East on three operations, including Afghanistan twice. Kat retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2019 to pursue her passion for the arts.
Her work explores how place, memory and experience layer and mesh, and who or what is forgotten after the war. In 2024, upon graduating from RMIT with first-class Honours in Fine Arts, Kat was awarded the School of Art Social Change Award. In the same year, Kat won the Australian War Memorial Napier Waller Art Prize for my work Deathmin, which was subsequently featured in the ABC documentary series When the War is Over (2025).
Extensively exhibited around Australia and a finalist in multiple prizes, my work is held by the Australian War Memorial, the Victorian Shrine of Remembrance and the Australian National Veterans Art Museum.
Kat’s work continues to contribute to evolving conversations around memory, loss, and the complexities of war commemoration.
