Mark O'Connor (poet)

Mark O'Connor OAM (born 1945) is an Australian poet, writer, inventor, and environmental activist, who has been a councillor (2012–2014) of the Australian Conservation Foundation. A major focus of O'Connor's work has been upon increasing the audience for poetry in English. His poetry has also involved co-operation with environmental scientists at various institutions. He has said he seeks to help Australians appreciate the variety and value of their own landscapes, and to adapt a European language (English) to regions for which it still lacks vocabulary. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, several of which deal with regions of Australia such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Blue Mountains, often collaborating with well-known nature photographers. He is also strongly interested in other languages and cultures. In 1977-1980 he travelled in Europe on a Marten Bequest Fellowship to write poetry about the Mediterranean region. He is the editor of the Oxford University Press anthology Two Centuries of Australian Poetry.

In 2000 he became the first "Olympic poet" of the modern Olympiads, receiving an Australia Council fellowship "to report in poetry upon all aspects of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games". He has also written short stories, literary criticism, and two books on the issue of overpopulation as a danger to environments. He has won numerous national and international prizes and awards, and has undertaken fellowships or writers-in-residency in several countries including United States, Europe, Russia, China and India. More recently he has produced updated verse-translations of some of Shakespeare's 400-year-old plays into lightly modernized English. He lives with his wife Jan Eagleton/O'Connor in Canberra.