Robbie Coburn

Robbie Coburn is an Australian poet.

His verse novel for young adults, The Foal in the Wire, will be published by Hachette Australia in 2025. Described by the publisher as ‘a deeply moving and personal story of survival, love, and the incredible bond between humans and animals’ that grew out of one of Coburn’s poems, The Foal in the Wire is about Sam, a 15-year-old ‘haunted by trauma and depression’, among other struggles including bullying, loss and disillusionment, whose life changes when he finds a wounded foal, an event that brings Julia—a young person ‘with an alcoholic father and a mother who abandoned the family’—into his life.

Called ‘one of Australia’s most essential poets’ by ArtsHub and compared to Sylvia Plath in the Sydney Morning Herald, Robbie’s poetry collections include Ghost Poetry (Upswell Publishing, 2024), And I Could Not Have Hurt You (Kiddiepunk, 2023), and The Other Flesh (UWA Publishing, 2019). His poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies both in Australia and overseas, including Poetry, Meanjin, Island, Westerly, Writing to the Wire (UWA Publishing, 2016) and To End All Wars (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018).

Robbie has also run poetry workshops for youth mental health organisation headspace.