AustLit

Of Polish-German ancestry, Peter Bakowski was born premature with a hole in the heart. At the age of eighteen Bakowski read the poetry of Jack Kerouac. Influenced by Kerouac's poems he travelled overseas in the 1980s. Around 1983 he began to write poetry. After his return to Australia, Bakowski lived in Melbourne while continuing to travel overseas including to London and Rome, where he was Poet in Residence at the Australian studio in 1997. In 1993 he had an operation to replace a failing mitral valve in his heart.

Apart from publications in both national and international literary magazines, Bakowski has also published volumes of verse. In 2006 he commenced preparation of a collection of portrait poems of real and imagined people and undertook the presentation of his poetry in private houses to audiences of eight or more.

In 2007 he was Asialink Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Macau. He has also been writer-in-residence at the B.R. Whiting Library (Rome), the Cite Internationale des Arts (Paris), the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre (Greenmount, Western Australia), the Hobart Writer’s Cottage (Battery Point, Tasmania), 'Bundanon' (the Arthur Boyd Estate, near Nowra, New South Wales), and the Broken Hill Poetry Festival (New South Wales).

By 2017, Bakwoski had published nine collections of poetry, including the French-English bilingual collection Le cœur à trois heures du matin (France, 2015).