Robbie Coburn is an Australian poet and young adult author. His debut YA verse novel The Foal in the Wire (Lothian Children’s Books, 2025) was shortlisted for the 2026 Young Adult Indie Book Award and the Ena Noёl Award.

He has published several collections of poetry, including And I Could Not Have Hurt You (Kiddiepunk, 2023), which was included on Dennis Cooper’s Mine For Yours: Favorites of 2023 list. His poems have appeared in many literary journals including Poetry, Poetry Salzburg Review, Hobart, Meanjin, Island and Westerly, and in anthologies including Anxiety vol. 2 (Filthy Loot, 2025), Oystercatcher One (Five Islands Press, 2024), To End All Wars (Puncher and Wattmann, 2018) and Writing to the Wire (UWAP, 2016). He has also published a number of chapbooks and zines.

Womb, his collaborative music and text album with noise artist TVISB, was released as a cassette tape in 2023 on Pale Ghoul Recordings.

He has been featured at The Wheeler Centre and La Mama Poetica, appeared as a guest at literary festivals including the Sydney Writers' Festival, Canberra Writers Festival, Newcastle Writers Festival and Perth Poetry Festival, and run poetry workshops for youth mental health organisation Headspace.

He grew up on a farm in regional Victoria and lives in Melbourne.

The real deal.

Sonya Hartnett


One of Australia’s most essential poets.

ArtsHub


Coburn’s poems come from tough experiences, yet are created with a muscular craft that glows with alert intelligence.

Robert Adamson


There is a confidence and clarity to the poems that are in turn imbued by striking imagery and a wonderful control of stanza and line length. These tender lyrics of wounded horses and birds become paeans to an epiphanic love. Coburn is unafraid to take the reader into a symbolic struggle and suffering of the body, and his superb control of tone and voice ensures each of these poems will remain with us.

Brendan Ryan


Coburn’s work is so raw yet so luminous and piercing to the point where the poetry is utterly transformative. The poetry is so much of the body but of the soul too which makes it remarkable.

Judith Beveridge


Coburn’s dreamlike poems… conjure landscapes that are ruinous, apocalyptic, and scarified. In these dark paddocks, horses and bodies bleed into one another, and the veil between external and internal worlds blurs. Coburn’s raw and intimate poems are marked by a strong presence of voice: confessional, consolatory, despairing, and defiant, these poems speak of impulses that are often repressed or left unsaid. Coburn deftly weighs the impulse towards harm with the yearning for recovery, reminding us, always, “what the lines have cost.”.

Sarah Holland-Batt


This collection made me feel in exactly the way that I want art to make me feel – it brought out feelings that I needed bringing out, it hurt me in a way that also felt beautiful. It made me feel – it reminded me I was alive.

Thomas Moore