Shane McLeod is a talented and introspective author whose creative exploration has been deeply influenced by personal experiences. The passing of his father marked a pivotal moment in Shane’s life, inspiring a profound exploration of themes centered on the search for connection and belonging. Through his writing, Shane delves into the intricate web of relationships, weaving autobiographical reflections that examine how patterns from the past continue to shape and resonate within the present.

Shane grew up in Melbourne and Hobart, in a home where silence often said more than words, and where the weight of family and unspoken rules carved themselves deep into the walls of everyday life. His earliest memories are not of bookshelves or libraries, but of listening — really listening — to the rhythm of conversations, arguments, footsteps, and pauses. Language, for Shane, was never just about what was said. It was what wasn’t.

His childhood was shaped by contradiction: the hardness of his surroundings and the softness he felt within. A mother with sharp words and sharper expectations. A distant father with fixed views on masculinity but buried tenderness. It was in this space between restraint and expression that Shane began to observe the world through a poetic lens — long before he ever wrote anything down.

He was drawn early to music, and later to writing, finding in both a language that allowed him to say what life didn’t let him speak aloud. Poetry became a way of shaping pain into form, giving meaning to memory, and untangling the grief of what was and what might have been.

Influenced by writers like Pablo Neruda, T.S. Eliot, C. P. Cavafy, and the Roman poet Virgil, Shane’s work carries a literary backbone rooted in myth, religion, and philosophy — but it is always personal, always reaching into the raw nerve of lived experience. His poems blend the epic with the intimate: Troy becomes a metaphor for addiction, Spinoza a stand-in for solitude, and white sheets the ledger of lost love.

His poetry collections are distillation of decades spent witnessing, carrying, and carving through life. His words are both a reckoning and a release.