Early Career Researchers

Hossein Asgari has recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing with the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at The University of Adelaide, during which he explored the life and poetry of the contemporary Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. He is currently working on his fourth (unpublished) novel, Decadence.

Aidan Coleman has published two collections of poetry with Brandl & Schlesinger, Avenues & Runways, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, and Asymmetry, which was shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Prize and the WA Premier’s Book Awards. A third collection, Mount Sumptuous, will be published by Wakefield Press in 2019.

His PhD on John Forbes’ early poetics was awarded the University of Adelaide Medal for Doctoral Research and he is currently writing Thin Ice: A Life of John Forbes with the assistance of the Australia Council for Literature and Arts South Australia.

He has also co-authored a series of Shakespeare textbooks, which are widely used in schools and colleges in Australia and New Zealand. He reviews regularly for publications such as Cordite and The Australian.

Dr Matthew Hooton is the Canadian author of the critically-acclaimed novels Typhoon Kingdom and Deloume Road. His short fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in journals, newspapers, and magazines around the world, including Westerly and Southerly here in Australia. He lectures in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where his research ranges from Korean history to Jim Henson's Muppets and the stunts of Evel Knievel. 

Dr Camille Roulière is an early career researcher whose work explores how humans engage and interact with their environments through art. In 2018, she was awarded a University Doctoral Research Medal for her PhD thesis entitled “Visions of Water” (The University of Adelaide). Camille also works creatively with a variety of materials, from words and musical notes, through to glass, metal and acrylics. Most notably, her work has been published in Southerly, Cordite Scholarly, Art + Australia, Meanjin, Shima and an anthology within Routledge’s Environmental Humanities series. She is currently co-editing a collection for Routledge (with Claudia Egerer, from Stockholm University) and has pieces forthcoming with The Saltbush Review and Wonderground.

Konstantin was born in Novosibirsk and commenced his studies at the age of six with Natalia Knobloch. He then studied in Moscow at the Russian Gnessin Academy of Music with Professors Tatiana Zelikman and Vladimir Tropp, and the Hochschule fur Musik in Freiburg, Germany with Professor Tibor Szasz. 

In 2008, Konstantin burst onto the concert scene when he won First Prize at the Sydney International Piano Competition. He is the first and only competitor to date in the 40 years of the competition to win both First and People’s Choice Prizes, in addition to six other prizes. He then went on to win First Prize at the 2011 Klavier Olympiade in Bad Kissingen, Germany and has performed at the Kissinger Sommer festival. In July 2013, following chamber recitals with Alban Gerhardt and Feng Ning, he was awarded the festival’s coveted Luitpold Prize for “outstanding musical achievements”.

Since then, Konstantin has performed extensively throughout the world. In Australia, future highlights include engagements with the Adelaide Symphony, West Australia, Melbourne and Sydney Symphony orchestras.  Outside of Australia, he has performed with the Russian National Philharmonic, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, Orchestre National de Lyon, Prague Philharmonia, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and the Calgary Philharmonic among others.  He has enjoyed collaborating with distinguished conductors such as Vladimir Spivakov, Dmitry Liss, Tugan Sokhiev, Nicholas Milton and Alexander Vedernikov.

Chamber music plays a strong role in Konstantin’s musical career and collaborations include tours with the Australian String Quartet, the Australia Piano Quartet, Kristof Barati, Andreas Brantelid, Li Wei Qin and Leonard Elschenbroich. In 2021, Konstantin will perform as part of the International Piano Series in Adelaide, the Melbourne Recital Centre and Ukaria Cultural Centre. He has enjoyed critical acclaim at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, the Bochum Festival in Germany, the Mariinsky International Piano Festival and the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg, Adelaide festival, 2019 Musica Viva Sydney and Huntington festivals. Konstantin has recorded albums with the labels Naxos, ABC Classics and Fonoforum.

Konstantin is Lecturer in Piano at the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide, and was recently awarded his PhD for his performance-based project ‘The piano as Kolokola, Glocken and Cloches: performing and extending the European traditions of bell-inspired piano music'.

Gemma Parker is a teacher and poet with First Class Honours in Politics. Her work has been published in Award Winning Australian Writing, Writ Review, Typishly and Tokyo Poetry Journal. Her PhD project offered a creative exploration of themes associated with Nietzschean nihilism in the lives and literature of Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett, configured as hybrid-genre prose-poetic fragments with aspects of memoir, literary criticism, biography and travel narrative. The creative work will be in dialogue with the deliberately unsystematic and fragmented works of Nietzche, and with his idea that art offers the greatest possible resistance to nihilism.