Stuart Barnes was born in Tasmania, educated at Monash University, Victoria, and lives in Queensland, Australia.

His first book, Glasshouses (UQP, 2016), was awarded the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, commended in the 2016 FAW Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 ASAL Mary Gilmore Award. His second book, Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023), was awarded the 2023 Wesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry, shortlisted for the 2024 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and highly commended in the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.

Stuart’s poems have been awarded the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award, the ACU Prize for Poetry, the Blake Poetry Prize, the Montreal International Poetry Prize and the Newcastle Poetry Prize, among others, and widely published, including in The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Best of Australian Poems 2025, Cordite Poetry Review, Griffith Review, The Language in My Tongue: An Anthology of Australian and New Zealand Poetry, Magma, The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2020, The Moth (Ireland), POETRY (Chicago), Poetry Wales, Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry, Southerly and The Weekend Australian Review.

Stuart, Nigel Featherstone, Melinda Smith and CJ Bowerbird are Hell Herons, an Australian spokenwork+music collective whose first record The Wreck Event is available on Bandcamp and all major streaming platforms.