About Christian Bök

Christian Bök is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he is the author of Eunoia — a bestseller, which has gone on to win the Griffin Poetry Prize. Bök is an avant-garde poet of global renown, earning his repute as one of the original founders of the literary movement called Conceptualism (a poetic school made famous, in part, by the activities of the poet, Kenneth Goldsmith, the proprietor of UbuWeb). Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso recitals of ‘sound-poems’ (particularly Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters) — and during his career he has performed his poetry at more than 650 venues around the world. Bök is on the verge of finishing his current project, entitled The Xenotext (a work that requires him to engineer a bacterium so that its DNA might become not only a durable archive that stores a poem for eternity, but also an operant machine that writes a poem in response). Bök has displayed examples of his artworks at dozens of galleries, including The Power Plant in Toronto, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. He resides, as an artist, in Melbourne.