Paul Magee is Professor of Poetry at the University of Canberra, where he directs the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR).

Paul Magee studied in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. He writes poetry, and works of scholarship. The latter address the philosophy, history, linguistics and ethnography of poetic composition; the relationship between art and inquiry; and new forms for facilitating the presentation of marginalised knowledges.

Paul has published five books. From Here to Tierra del Fuego (2000) is a historical monograph on travel, colonisation and the fantastic in Chilean and Argentinian Tierra del Fuego. Paul's first book of poems,Cube Root of Book (2006), was shortlisted in the Innovation category of the 2008 Adelaide Festival Awards for literature. His second, Stone Postcard (2014),  was named in Australian Book Review as one of the books of the year for 2014. The monograph, Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (2022), was  based on Paul's work as a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project Understanding Creative Excellence: A Case Study in Poetry (2013-6), which involved interviews with 80 celebrated Anglophone poets. The work focusses on poetic composition, with an eye to what cognitive science, linguistics, ethnography and philosophy have to reveal about the two-three seconds in which each new phrase emerges. Paul's third book of verse, Later Unearthed, was published by Puncher and Wattmann in 2025.

Paul has two key current research projects. The first involves teaching, and studying the effects of teaching, creative writing to ill and injured service people, as part of the University of Canberra's Defence ARRTS research tender (2015-), which is led by Professor Tony Eaton of the University of Canberra and constitutes one of the longest running arts-health programmes in Australia. Key questions for that research are the relationship, negative, positive or otherwise, between traumatic experience and creative imagination, and the role of artistic production, both solo and group, in processes of repair.

The second project involves working with Barkindji and Nyempa people at Bourke and Brewarrina, Outback New South Wales, and Yuin people at Wreck Bay, Jervis Bay Territory, on research aimed at platforming Indigenous writers and storytellers via traditional and emerging genres of creative writing. Co-run with Paul Collis (Barkindji) and Jen Crawford, both of whom work at the University of Canberra, this ongoing project (2017-) includes research funded over 2022-24 by the the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Global Challenges Relief Fund (GCRF) supported project Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts for the development of innovative transcription practices aimed at bringing Australian Indigenous story-telling to the fore. The AHRC/GCRF-funded work has led to the publication of nine Indigenous-authored dialogues to date, in a range of Australian, European and North American magazines and journals, while the work at Wreck Bay led to the 2026 launch of ​Bugiya-Yesterday-Nhaway-Today-Buraadja-Tomorrow: Stories of the Wreck Bay People. That work combines poetry, memoir, oral history and photography composed with the research team's editorial support at Wreck Bay and on campus; a further anthology is planned.