DemiMonde Despatches
DemiMonde Despatches features the Words of Life and Words of Death, of novelist, writer and poet, Doctor Patrick Johnston.
Literary Work
Biography
Patrick Johnston is an Anglo-Australian writer working in poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms. His work explores absurdity, memory, faith, liminality, and the collapse of narrative authority, often through fragmented mythos and recurring characters within a shared fictional ecosystem he refers to as the Demi-Monde.
He was formerly a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and worked in Defence Science, experiences that continue to inform his interest in cognition, perception, uncertainty, and systems that fail under pressure. He lives with Bipolar II disorder, a condition that shapes both the rhythms of his life and the tonal extremes of his writing.
In the past year, he has secured over 70 acceptances in literary journals, comprising more than 120 individual pieces, including multi-poem sequences, prose cycles, and excerpts from both a completed novel and several works-in-progress. His writing appears in journals such as The Louisville Review, Thin Air Magazine, Litro Magazine USA, White Wall Review, Seems, Blood + Honey, and Argyle Literary Magazine, among others, and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination. His publications demonstrate a distinctive range, from tightly controlled short fiction to conceptually driven poetry and an emerging, interconnected mythos.
He lives between the UK, Australia and Southeast Asia. This site functions as a working archive of his published and in-progress work.
Academic Research
Before exploring the human mind through fiction and poetry, I spent my career investigating its cognitive and neural foundations using advanced neuroimaging and computational modelling techniques. You can find my scientific publications on Google Scholar.