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.
A Winter Sowing
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2021
David Young is a divorced Vietnam veteran, an artist and a gardener. He is trying to come to terms with the trauma of war through his painting. With every brush-stroke he seeks to transform the moments of brutality, the memories of violence that plague his nights and haunt his days. At the same time, he is trying to manage a fractious relationship with his feisty sixteen-year-old daughter, Josie. When a single mum and her son move into the flat next door, further complications enter David’s life. As he tries to find a way forward, Josie enters a downward spiral. David believes his trauma is somehow becoming hers. When his daughter’s life threatens to spin out of control, he must do everything he can to save her …
A Winter Sowing is a moving exploration of the unspeakable and a compelling story of one man’s quest for redemption through art and love.
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.
