We were saddened this week to read of the death of West Australian poet Alec Choate.
Alec Choate at the Premier's Book Awards dinner on 26 February, 1998. Alec Choate was the winner of the Poetry category in the 1997 awards.
Alec Choate was born in England in 1915 and migrated to Western Australia in 1922. He was educated at Gwelup Primary School and Hale School. He served in the AIF in the Middle East and the Pacific in the Second World War. After the war he worked as a surveyor with the Public Works Department.
He published seven collections of poetry and edited Summerland: A Western Australian Sesquicentenary Anthology of Poetry and Prose (1979). He won numerous awards including the 1997 Premier’s Book Award for Poetry for his collected war poems, The Wheels of Hama.
You can find more about or by Alec Choate in the collections of the State Library.
You can read more about Alec Choate’s life in:
- UWA University News
- The West Australian Obituaries, Monday 9th August (p.39). (also available in the library in the West Australian Archive Digital Editions)
- AustLit database (brief information only, full subscription database available in the library)
