Bernard Cohen is the author of When I Saw the Animal, The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies, Hardly Beach
Weather, Snowdome, The Blindman's
Hat and Tourism and the
children's picture book, Paul Needs
Specs (illustrated by Geoff Kelly).
The Antibiography of Robert F Menzies won the 2015 Russell Prize for Humour Writing and an Arts
Council of England Writer's Award. The Blindman's
Hat was awarded the Australian/Vogel Award in 1996. Paul Needs Specs was shortlisted for the 2004 Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year Award. Bernard is the only writer named three times as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young
Australian Novelists (1997, 1998 and 1999). He was an inaugural University of Technology Sydney alumnus of the year and holds a Doctorate in Creative Arts from UTS.
Since winning the young writers' section of the Canberra Times short story competition in 1986, Bernard's stories, articles and poems have appeared
in dozens of anthologies, newspapers, magazines and literary journals around the world, including The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Essays, Harvard Review, Times Educational Supplement and most major Australian literary magazines. He has won several short story contests and was shortlisted for the 2018 Overland Fair Australia Poetry Prize.
Other writing projects include Speedfactory
(co-written with John Kinsella, McKenzie Wark and Terri-ann
White, Fremantle ACP, 2002) and
the installation work Foreign Logics, with artist David Bickerstaff. Foreign Logics was an Institute of Contemporary Art (London) multimedia work of the month and was exhibited around the UK.
Bernard lived in the UK from 1999-2002, undertaking residencies and collaborative writing projects including at Peckham Library in
south London, where he worked predominantly with young Afro-Caribbean
Britons, University College Worcester and Nottingham
Trent University. In
2002, He was writer-in-residence at Sir
John Soane's Museum (London), where he established the Fictional
Soane website and ran workshops for school children.
The child of noted educators, Bernard
founded The Writing
Workshop in 2006. Since then he has worked with over 80,000 young people and led professional development workshops for hundreds of teachers. See The Writing Workshop website for more info.
He lives in Sydney, Australia.
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