Alan Wearne has been part of the Australian poetry scene since the late sixties and is the author of three verse collections: Public Relations; New Devil, New Parish; The Australian Popular Songbook; as well as Out Here (a verse novella), and the award-winning verse novels The Nightmarkets (which has also been adapted for the stage), Kicking in Danger (a prose fantasy satire on Melbourne's football) and The Lovemakers, which was published in two volumes in Australia. Alan Wearne teaches poetry at the University of Wollongong and lives part of the year in Fremantle. He considers himself a Melbourne poet living in exile.

The Lovemakers is the crowning achievement of a career that has been stubbornly original in the poetic forms that it employs, supple in language, astringent in thought. [Peter Pierce The Bulletin]But The Lovemakers isn't just about overdoing it: it performs overdoing it. Wearne's aesthetic is one of excess, of conspicuous idiosyncrasy. Part of its excessiveness and oddity is its oxymoronic status. Wearne's books are simultaneously poetic and prosy, realistic and outre, stylistically heterogeneous and tonally homogenous. [David McCooey Australian Book Review]