Ron Pretty

Ronald Keith Pretty (16 October 1940 – 30 June 2023) was an Australian poet, editor, publisher and teacher.

Ronald Keith Pretty was born on the 16 October 1940 in Sydney, New South Wales.

Pretty taught writing at the University of Wollongong and Melbourne University as well as in schools, colleges and a broad variety of community organisations.

For a twenty-year period he ran Five Islands Press, publishing some 230 books of poetry and mentored many Australian poets.

He edited the magazines Scarp: New Arts and Writing and Blue Dog: Australian Poetry for a number of years.

From 1983 to 1999, Pretty was the Head of Writing in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong.

Pretty was awarded the NSW Premier's Award for Poetry and was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to Australian literature in 2002.

He was based at the University of Melbourne from 2003 to 2007 where he taught creative writing and was managing editor of Blue Dog: Australian Poetry from 2002 to 2007.

Pretty was instrumental in establishing the Poetry Australia Foundation, which led to the Australian Poetry Centre, one of two organisations which merged in 2011 to form Australian Poetry.

Pretty died on 30 June 2023, at the age of 82.

In 2012, he spent six months at the Whiting Studio in Rome, having been awarded a residency by the Australia Council for the Arts.

He has had residencies at the Tasmanian Writers Centre, the Katherine Susannah Prichard Centre in WA, and at Hill End Artists' Studio in NSW.

Reviews for Ron Pretty's 2013 book, What the Afternoon Knows include:

In 2014, Five Islands Press established the Ron Pretty Poetry Prize in honour of Ron's energy and creative vigour devoted to poetry for more than 40 years.

He was admitted as a Fellow of the University of Wollongong in 2015.