A.J. Carruthers is a poet, critic, and teacher. He holds a PhD from the University of Sydney, and worked for half a decade in China, as Associate Professor at the Department of English, Nanjing University, and prior to that Lecturer in Shanghai University of International Business and Economics. He has taught at the Australian National University, the University of Wollongong, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Sydney, where he received his PhD (2014).

A.J. Carruthers won the 2024 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, and is the first non-US poet to have achieved the award. His work as a poet revolves around the writing of a long poem Axis, of which there are three volumes so far: Axis Book 1: Areal (Vagabond, 2014), Axis Book 2 (Vagabond, 2019) and most recently Axis Z Book 3 (Cordite, 2023). For The Glasgow Review of Books “Reading across the columns of Axis is like reading a music of concepts, carefully composed, but brought together by one’s own process of thinking” and a prompt for “those interested in the future of truly innovative poetry to look to Australia for new takes on the traditions, and, as innovative poetry has always offered, on the idea of tradition itself.” Recent poetry appears in Best Australian Poems 2024 and Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image and Sound.

A.J. Carruthers’ scholarly trajectory began with North American poetics, represented by his first monograph, Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems: Stave Sightings (Palgrave, 2017). Coming to Australian literary studies with a transnational bent, his second monograph, Literary History and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Antipodes: Languages of Invention (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), brings his expertise in North American and European poetics to bear on Australian poetry. It has been recently reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement as an “original” and “vast and generous act of scholarship.”

He has worked as essays editor for Rabbit, and as reviews editor for Southerly, Australia’s oldest literary journal. He is a member of the S0d Editorial collective.