B N Oakman's deceptively conversational tone and wry humour complement writing that is elegant, sometimes confronting, and which shuns obscurity in favour of clarity. He elicits feeling through style, phrasing and understatement rather than by imposing emotion. You'll be drawn into topics ranging from the socio-economic to the personal - the ekphrastic to football - the political to the historical. B N Oakman came to poetry after spending much of his working life teaching economics at universities in Australia and England. During this time he also wrote and published short stories, most of them prize-winning. In 2006 he started offering poems to publishers. Subsequently his work has been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers in Australia, the UK and the USA. He was awarded a grant by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for 2009. A chapbook, Chalk Dust: Poems from the Social Domain (Mark Time Books), appeared during the same year. He reads from his work publicly, most often at the popular Castlemaine Poetry Readings which take place monthly, not far from where he lives in Central Victoria.