Tranter was born in Cooma, New South Wales and attended country schools, then took his BA in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He has worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, making more than twenty reading tours to venues in the U.S., Britain and Europe since the mid-1980s. He has lived in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia, and overseas in London, Cambridge, Singapore, Florida, and San Francisco. He now lives in Sydney, where he is a company director (with his wife Lyn) of Australian Literary Management, a leading literary agency. He is married to Lyn, with adult children Kirsten and Leon, and is presently (2008) in the final year of a doctoral programme at the University of Wollongong.

In 1975 he co-designed the first Books & Writing radio program for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a program format which was still going strong thirty years later. During 1987 and 1988 John Tranter was in charge of the ABC Radio National weekly two-hour arts program Radio Helicon, and from 1990 to 1993 he was the poetry editor of the Sydney-based business/ arts weekly The Bulletin.

He has received many fellowships and other grants, and has been a visiting scholar at various institutions, from Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University to writer-in-residence at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida and at Cambridge University in England. He has published over twenty volumes of poetry, including a Selected Poems (Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1982) and a Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected University of Queensland Press in 2006.

John Tranter's Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected, published by the University of Queensland Press, won the Victorian Premier's Prize for poetry in 2006, the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize in 2007, the South Australian Premier's Awards John Bray prize for poetry in 2008 and the South Australian Premier's Awards Premier's Prize for the best book overall (2006 and 2007) in 2008, his Under Berlin, published by the University of Queensland Press, won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (the New South Wales State Literary Award for Poetry) in 1989, and At The Florida won the Melbourne Age 'Book of the Year' award for poetry in 1993. Other recent books are The Floor of Heaven (Harper Collins, 1992), a book-length sequence of four verse narratives, the poetry collections Late Night Radio (Polygon, Edinburgh, UK, 1998), Heart Print (Salt, Cambridge, UK, 2001), Different Hands (Folio/ Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Cambridge and Western Australia, 1998), a collection of seven experimental computer-assisted prose pieces, Borrowed Voices (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2002), a dozen reinterpretations of poems by other poets, Studio Moon and Trio (both Salt Publications, UK, 2003).

He compiled and edited The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry with Philip Mead in 1991. Earlier anthologies include the controversial The New Australian Poetry (Makar, Brisbane, 1979), and a selection of ninety-four poems from the Australian bicentennial poetry competition in 1988, published by ABC Books as The Tin Wash Dish.

In 2004 he built a free prototype internet site that presented biographical and bibliographical information about over seventy Australian poets as well as poems, book reviews and interviews. In 2005 he handed the project over to a consortium consisting of the University of Sydney English Department, the University of Sydney Library and the Copyright Agency Limited. In 2006 the consortium was granted half a million dollars by the Australian Research Council to further extend the work as a research project as the Australian Poetry Research Internet Library (APRIL) with an internet site hosted by the University of Sydney Library, at http://april.edu.au

• 1970: Parallax, South Head Press
• 1973: Red Movie and other poems, Angus & Robertson
• 1973: The Blast Area Gargoyle Poets number 13), Makar Press
• 1976: The Alphabet Murders (notes from a work in progress), Angus & Robertson
• 1977: Crying in Early Infancy: 100 Sonnets, Makar Press
• 1979: Dazed in the Ladies Lounge, Island Press
• 1983: Selected Poems, Hale & Iremonger
• 1993: Under Berlin, University of Queensland Press
• 1993: The Floor of Heaven, HarperCollins/Angus & Robertson
• 1993: At The Florida, University of Queensland Press
• 1998: Late Night Radio Polygon Press
• 2006: Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected, University of Queensland Press
• 2010: Starlight: 150 Poems, University of Queensland Press

As editor

• 2007: The Best Australian Poetry 2007, guest editor, University of Queensland Press