Lee Cataldi (born 1942) is a contemporary

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poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

and

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

Biography

Cataldi (née Sonnino) was born in

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during

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when, owing to her father’s

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heritage, she was technically an 'enemy alien'. As a child she lived in

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, moving back to Sydney for university. She won the University Medal, publishing her thesis as A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric (by Lee A. Sonnino). She studied at Cambridge before meeting her future husband Italian Gianni Cataldi. Since returning to Australia in the 1970s Cataldi has worked as a teacher and a linguist, on

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languages in

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and Balgo. In the late sixties she travelled to

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and

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where she became a

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, inspired by the May 1968 uprising in France. Cataldi's first book of poems, ''Invitation to a Marxist lesbian party'', was published in 1978, winning the Anne Elder Memorial Prize in that year. ''Women who live on the ground'' (1990) received the

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Poetry Award; it was also short-listed for the

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. ''Race against time'' (1998) won the 1999

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is awarded annually as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for a book of collected poems or for a single poem of substantial length published in book form.Madras Chennai, also known as Madras ( its official name until 1996), is the capital and largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India. It is located on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal. According to the 2011 Indian ce ...

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, for an Asialink Literature Residency. , she lives in

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Bibliography

Poetry

* ''Invitation to a Marxist lesbian party'',

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, 1978 * ''Women who live on the ground: Poems, 1978-1988'',

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, 1990 * ''Race against time: Poems'', Penguin Australia, 1998 * ''Mourning is Women's Business'', Puncher & Wattmann, 2023

Non-fiction

* ''Warlpiri Dreamings and Histories: Newly Recorded Stories from the Aboriginal Elders of Central Australia''. Coll. and trans. with Peggy Rockman Napaljarri,

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, 2003.

References

External links