DR BRENTLEY FRAZER CAREER PROFILE
- Brentley Frazer is a critically acclaimed Australian poet.
- The Creative Component of his doctoral thesis: Scoundrel Days: a memoir (2017) was published by the University of Queensland Press during his PhD candidacy at Griffith University.
- After the publication of his experimental novelised memoir (written entirely using the literary constraint English Prime) Brentley was critically and contemporaneously regarded as among the most challenging and innovative of writers in Australia.
- In 2018 Brentley was referred to as a ‘literary legend’ by the Courier Mail for decades of contribution to Queensland Poetry and support for Australian writers as founder and editor of independent literary anthologies Retort Magazine (Digital 2001 -2012) and Bareknuckle Poet Journal of Letters: Poetry-Fiction-Non-Fiction (Digital + Print 2013 – 2021).
Reviews of Scoundrel Days
Scoundrel Days provides us with that rarest of literary treats: a good dose of the shocking … an immersive, vital prose that drags the reader along. This is not your ordinary memoir. Frazer is writing here in the tradition of Helen Garner, Andrew McGahan and Nick Earls. This is dirty realism at its dirtiest.
A visceral and urgent internal perspective which is both direct and poetic, often charming, and sometimes bleakly funny. Frazer oscillates between bravado and moments of self-awareness. This enigmatic, self-styled outsider bravely lets us into the inner sanctum, which makes for a fascinating read.
Frazer is a legendary protagonist, in the vein of Bukowski’s literary alter-ego. His writing is compared to McGahan’s coming-of-age novel Praise, but Frazer uses that nervy present-perfect tense to take us further, faster, harder. It has more in common with the hyperbolic, ugly-beautiful prose of Kathy Acker.
Described by Dazed & Confused as a ‘21st century Baudelaire on acid’Brentley’s
unconventionality, radicalism, aggression, schizophrenia, non-adaptability and sublimity with hallucinogenic scenes and pornographic moments, a bizarre mix of elements of neo-symbolism and post-romanticism, wrapped in a form of hypertext prose, finds itself somewhere at the intersection of Burroughs, Breton, Rimbaud, Salinger and Ian Curtis.
