Resume

“Tug Dumbly is a phenomenon. He is a masterful performer and an excellent communicator with a vigour for spoken word that electrifies the room.” The Scotsman (Edinburgh Fringe Festival)

Tug Dumbly is one of Australia’s most highly recognised and broadcast spoken-word artists, and has an extensive performance history, both on stage and radio, including long-term regular guest spots on ABC radio stations Triple-J and the ABC’s National Local Radio Network. For a number of years he performed weekly poems as a guest on both the James Valentine and Richard Glover programs on ABC Sydney 702.

As well as organising and hosting one of Australia’s longest standing and most successful spoken word night, Bardflys, at the Friend in Hand Hotel, Sydney, Tug has performed at numerous festivals, nationally and abroad, including London, Montreal, Edinburgh and New York, where he competed with an Australian Slam team at the legendary Nyuorican Poets' Café. He also performs extensively in schools and other venues around Australia.

Tug is foremost a ‘spoken word’ poet and his work has been written primarily with a view to live performance, and not publishing. However, he has had his work featured, in both print and audio versions, in 'SHORT FUSE: A Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry' (Rattapallax, New York, 2002). In 2015 he came runner up in the prestigious Josephine Ulrick Poetry prize (through Griffith University), and has had his work published in a number of Australian literary journals, including, in 2016, Verandah, Offset and 4W. He was also longlisted for the 2016 Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, through Canberra University.

Tug has released two spoken-word CD’s through the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) - Junk Culture Lullabies and Idiom Savant, and his 8000-word epic ode to meat Barbeque Bill and the Roadkill Café won the 1997 Banjo Paterson Prize for comic verse, which he has won twice. He has also twice won the Nimbin World Performance Poetry Cup, and the Spirit of Woodford Story Telling Competition at the Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland. Dumbly’s “one-man musical-tragedy” Deadstar has enjoyed acclaimed seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, and he is currently writing a new one-man show, Dumbly Does the Bible, in which he will attempt to perform the entire Bible in one hour.