Graham Lang

Graham Lang was born in Zimbabwe and migrated to Australia in 1990. An MFA graduate from Rhodes University, South Africa, he also holds a PhD from the University of Newcastle where he taught art for twenty years before moving to Tasmania in 2011. His career as a painter and sculptor spans four decades during which he has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas and taken up several artist residencies, including two at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. His art is essentially biographical in its attempt to evoke both the external and internal realities of place and being. Much of his early practice reflects the political and existential anguish of post-colonial southern Africa; similarly, the broad-ranging work produced during his time in Newcastle centres most prominently on themes relating to migration, identity and cultural dislocation. Since leaving academe, his art has tended toward a more intuitive approach, exploring a diverse array of subjects, many derived from his literary interests.

Graham has also forged a significant career as a writer, exploring associated themes of land and identity in three novels, Clouds like Black Dogs (2003), Place of Birth (2006) and Lettah’s Gift (2011) and a novella, A Fulcrum of Infinities (2016), which won this year’s prestigious Griffith Review Novella Competition.