Patrick Allington is Manager: Graduate Research Development in the UniSA Resarch Office. Through the provision of proactive, high quality research management and research support services, Research and Innovation Services enables UniSA’s researchers to identify and translate funding opportunities, and effectively administer and manage leading edge research projects.
Patrick has a BA (Hons) and MA in Politics and a PhD in Creative Writing. He has held various roles in the higher education sector, the publishing industry and government, including two Royal Commissions. He is a widely published writer of fiction, peer reviewed scholarship, general nonfiction and book criticism. He brings a mix of teaching, research, editorial and... Read more
About me
Patrick Allington is Manager: Graduate Research Development in the UniSA Resarch Office. Through the provision of proactive, high quality research management and research support services, Research and Innovation Services enables UniSA’s researchers to identify and translate funding opportunities, and effectively administer and manage leading edge research projects.
Patrick has a BA (Hons) and MA in Politics and a PhD in Creative Writing. He has held various roles in the higher education sector, the publishing industry and government, including two Royal Commissions. He is a widely published writer of fiction, peer reviewed scholarship, general nonfiction and book criticism. He brings a mix of teaching, research, editorial and industry experience to the role of Manager Graduate Research Development.
Research
Excludes commercial-in-confidence projects.
Select projects as editor
Guest editor of The Circular, ‘On History, Poetry and the Official Past’, edition 21, 29 April 2022.
Co-editor of a special issue of TEXT, ‘Climates of Change’, Papers from the 2017 AAWP annual conference, 2018.
Co-editor, Griffith Review 55, ‘State of Hope’, 2017.
Co-editor of a special issue of Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 2016.
Co-editor of a special section, ‘Book Reviewing in Australia’, within Australian Humanities Review 60, 2016.
Book reviews editor, Transnational Literature, 2014-16.
Research
Books
Making the Grade: a guide to successful study and professional communication, 5th edn, 2021, co-authored with Iain Hay (OUP).
Rise & Shine, 2021 (Scribe), fiction, shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.
Figurehead, 2009 (Black Inc.), longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Shorter non-fiction (traditional and non-traditional research outputs)
'Interview #207 — Patrick Allington', interviewer Lyn Dickens, Liminal, November 2022.
‘Other Ways of Living’ (on Danielle Celermajer’s Summertime: reflections on a vanishing future), Sydney Review of Books, 2022.
‘To Be or Not To Be a Tree’ (on Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree), Sydney Review of Books, 2022.
‘The Personal Landscape’ (on Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possessions), Sydney Review of Books, 2022.
‘Freewheeling Futures’ (on Jeanette Winterson’s 12 Bytes), Sydney Review of Books, 2021.
‘On Ancient Aliens, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and the Unhinged Pleasures of Speculative Nonfiction’, Lithub, 2021.
‘I believe: on Hilma af Klint and the writing life’, Meanjin, Spring 2021.
‘When You’re the Target Audience for the Futurist Paintings of a Long-Dead Swedish Artist’, LitHub, 2021.
‘Mr Difficult Rides Again: On the Unexpected Genius of William Gaddis’s Masterpiece’, LitHub, 2020.
‘On human and non-human people: an interview with Jane Rawson’, Writers in Conversation, 6, 2, 2019.
‘Why AFL commentary works the same way as Iron Age epic poetry’, co-authored with Erin Sebo, The Conversation, 27 September 2018.
‘Writing about Asia from Australia: notes towards avoiding a firm view’, TEXT, special edition, Ideas and realities: Creative writing in Asia today, 2017, eds Sally Breen and Sanaz Fotouhi.
On Necessary Disjointedness: The Pol Pot Period in Alice Pung’s Memoirs’, Life Writing, 14, 4, 2017.
2017: ‘“No winner”: on the Miles Franklin in 1973’, Sydney Review of Books, 2017.
‘Provocatively calm: on David Malouf as essayist’, TEXT, special edition 39, 2017.
‘God bless the footy: dissent and distractions’, Griffith Review 55, ‘State of Hope’, 2017.
‘On the abolition of Question Time’, Griffith Review 51, ‘Fixing the System’, 2016.
‘Australian Literary Magazines as Sites of Dissent’, Logos: Journal of the World Publishing Community, 27(1), 2016.
‘A Defence of Tempered Praise and Tempered Criticism in Book Reviewing’, Australian Humanities Review, 60, 2016.
‘“Have you considered …?”: written feedback and the student creative writer’, Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, special issue, December 2016.
‘Why the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards need an urgent overhaul’, The Conversation, 22 June, 2016.
‘That Deadman Dance’ (essay on the Kim Scott novel), Reading Australia, 2015.
‘Interview with Peter Carey’, in Kill Your Darlings, 20, 2015.
‘Miles Franklin Loosens Up’, Australian Book Review, June 2012.
‘What is Australia, anyway? The glorious limitations of the Miles Franklin Literary Award’, in Australian Book Review, June 2011 (inaugural ABR Patrons’ Fellow).
Shorter fiction
‘The Real One’, Liminal, 2022.
‘Looking Good’, in Sally Breen, Ravi Shankar & Tim Tomlinson (eds), Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing, Drunken Boat Media and AWPT, 2020.
‘Night and Day’, in Julia Prendergast, Shane Strange & Jen Webb (eds), The incompleteness book, Recent Work Press, 2020.
‘Bob Dylan’s Last Interview’, Review of Australian Fiction, 23, 3, 2017.
‘At Halo’s’, The Melbourne Review, January 2014.
‘At Rothko’, Kill Your Darlings, January 2013.
‘It’s a Dry Heat’, The Melbourne Review, January 2013.
‘Skylights’, Griffith Review, 30, Summer 2010.
‘Trumpet’, The Big Issue, July 2010.
‘Facades’, Meanjin, 68, 4, December 2009.
‘Snapshots,’ Griffith Review, 14, November, 2006.
‘Nearly Blind,’ H. Ashley-Brown & others (eds) The Body, Wakefield Press, 2004.
‘Potatoes in All Their Glory,’ Heather Johnson & others (eds) Cracker! A Christmas Collection, Wakefield Press, 2003.
‘Sheep blues,’ Southerly, 58, 1, 1998.
‘Good bloke’s diatribe’, Shelley James (ed.) Every Colour but Blue, Cliff St Publishing, 1995.
Book criticism
My book criticism has been widely published in Mekong Review, Australian Book Review, Transnational Literature, The Weekend Australian, The Advertiser, The Monthly and elsewhere.