author
Francis Adams
1862–1893
A brilliant, restless writer of the 1890s, he packed poetry, fiction, journalism, and sharp political feeling into a life that ended far too soon. His work is closely tied to radical thought and the literary culture of both Britain and Australia.
2 Audiobooks
Songs of the Army of the Night
by Francis Adams
Australian Essays
by Francis Adams
About the author
Born in Malta in 1862, Francis William Lauderdale Adams was educated in England and France and went on to become a poet, novelist, journalist, and essayist. Although British by birth, he is strongly connected with Australian literary history because of the years he spent there in the 1880s, when he wrote energetically and became involved with radical political and cultural debates.
Adams is remembered for his anti-capitalist views and for writing that mixed literary ambition with social criticism. In a very short lifetime, he produced a remarkably wide range of work, including poems, fiction, drama, and commentary, and became associated with the fin-de-siècle world as well as with Australian nationalism and reformist ideas.
His life was brief but productive: he died in 1893, just before his thirty-first birthday. That early death gave his career an unfinished quality, but it also helps explain why readers still find him striking — he wrote with urgency, intensity, and the sense that literature mattered in public life.