Dr Judith Bishop has penned Circadia, the third book in her trilogy focussed on time.
“Circadia is a word I coined. It combines ‘circadian’, the daily rhythms of life, with ‘arcadia’, a word that came to mean a ‘utopia’,” Dr Bishop said.
“The idea was that it would be a book about the joys of everyday life and the experience of everyday time.”
The 2024 TBM Fellow said her poems responded to a range of issues and world events that transpired while she was creating the new book, such as the global pandemic and the war in Ukraine. These shifted the work in directions Dr Bishop hadn’t originally foreseen. The book returns to more joyful themes in the second half, including a series of poems on women and non-binary artists.
The Tracey Banivanua Mar (TBM) Fellowship was established in 2018 as part of the SAGE Athena Swan initiative and is a part-time or full-time research-only position for up to three years.
Dr Bishop has a PhD in Linguistics and over 17 years of industry experience within AI technologies as a linguist and Director of Appen.
She also has two award-winning collections of poetry, Event (2007) and Interval (2018), as well as three poetry chapbooks. Alongside this, she has held various positions at La Trobe within strategic campaign operations and philanthropic proposal writing in the Alumni and Advancement team.
Watch Judith Bishop read two selected poems at the La Trobe University library on the Bundoora campus.
One poem was inspired by the Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-Ki, the other, by walks in the bush during the pandemic.
Order a copy of Circadia from the University of Queensland Press.
