Matthew McLaughlin

Matthew McLaughlin was born in 1978 in Toowoomba, Australia, where he lived until the age of 17. He spent a year in the south of France (Provence) studying French before returning to Australia to continue his studies of both the French and Japanese language.

Since 2000, the author has lived in various parts of Japan. In 2005 he returned to Australia for a 2-year-period in order to complete his MA in Japanese translation and interpreting at the University of Queensland and has called Japan his home ever since 2007. In 2012 he obtained an MA in TESOL from Temple University (Japan Campus).

Currently, he lectures on Modernist poetry and beat-generation literature at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, where he resides with his family. ALong with his academic career in the field of English literature and education, he is also a full-time practicing freelance translator of Japanese-to-English texts.

In 2013, Partridge Singapore published his debut, First Harvest, (heavily influenced by such Beat generation luminaries as Kerouac, Corso, and McClure) under his former penn-name ‘Mat Kondo.’ Into the Fading Light represents a selection of McLaughlin’s best poems composed between 2014~2019 and constitutes his second volume of verse. McLaughlin is currently working on a novel called Metropolitan Beasts which he plans to publish in the near future.

(In addition to the above bio-data, I wish to add that I’m interested in most beat-generation writers, but especially the works of Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Ira Cohen (if he can be called  ‘beat’), Sinclair Beiles, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and many others. I’m also interested in possibly translating Kerouac’s Scripture of the Golden Eternity into Japanese in future (in collaboration with another Japanese translator) and am interested in writing papers on Piero Heliczer, a contemporary of the beats, whose work I feel has been sadly neglected.)