UQP acquires Tim Loveday’s “your father was a bastard”

University of Queensland Press (UQP) has acquired world rights to your father was a bastard, the debut poetry collection by Naarm-based poet and academic Tim Loveday.

According to the publisher, the collection is “distinguished by its use of long-form narrative poetry and its examination of male violence as legacy”. The poems tell stories “both archetypal and particular of how this violence can shadow and permeate” families, and critiques contemporary masculinities, exploring the intersections of machismo, regionality, class, coloniality and climate collapse.

Loveday is a poet, writer and academic whose work explores class, masculinity, online radicalisation and climate collapse. He teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne and RMIT and is poetry editor at Island magazine.

Loveday said, “Masculinity, while sometimes myriad and multiple, is often densely archetypal, repetitive, cyclical, intensely interlinked with systems of colonisation and class and patriarchy […] That’s what I hope this collection asks: is it possible to depart the house of a violent father, especially when that house is everywhere – especially when you are yourself that father?”

Publisher Aviva Tuffield said Loveday’s “superb debut collection is a clear-sighted cultural critique of toxic masculinity and domestic abuse, and a nuanced examination of how formative these violences can be on the young male psyche”.

“Formally inventive and beautifully crafted, your father was a bastard is a timely, lyrical work of interrogation and reflection, and I’m delighted that UQP gets to publish what I’m sure will be the first of Tim’s many books,” said Tuffield.

UQP plans to publish your father was a bastard in May 2027.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions