Dorothy Porter was a commercially and critically successful Australian poet, with an international following. A remarkable performer of her own work, she achieved unusual success with verse novels, one of which, The Monkey’s Mask, was made into a film and adapted for BBC radio.

She was born in 1954 in Sydney, the eldest of three daughters. Her father, Chester Porter, was a distinguished QC, who famously defended Lindy Chamberlain in the “dingo baby” case, and her mother Jean was a chemistry teacher. Brought up in a house full of books, Porter loved poetry from an early age, later recalling that she always had “a little leather-bound copy of Keats in my pocket, which I used to read during prayers and so on”.

She attended Queenwood School and Sydney University, where she was taught by David Malouf, who described her as “a really feisty person” with “a grasp of life which was extraordinary”. She gained a BA in English and history, and later a diploma of education. A number of, predominantly low-paid, jobs followed, including working as a bus conductor in Israel. Later in life she taught creative writing at the University of Technology in Sydney. She moved to Melbourne in 1993 to be with her life partner, the novelist Andrea Goldsmith.

Her first volume of poems, Little Hoodlum, was published in 1975, when she was still a student, but it was not until her fourth collection, Driving Too Fast (1989) that she began to get noticed outside what she called the “small, querulous” and “distinctly unglamorous” world of Australian poetry.

Hostile to writing which was “anaemic, or a cerebral exercise for a handful of superannuated academics”, Porter instead offered energetic, spare, sexy and irreverent poetry, which she was able to perform with unforgettable passion and energy. In 1992 she published Akhenaten, a verse novel about the Egyptian pharaoh, which has been described as “a rich confection of incest, bisexuality, heresy, gender bending and the transience of even earthly celebrity”.

Commercial success came unexpectedly with her second verse novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian detective thriller. Although poetry rarely achieves wide attention and commercial success, still less verse novels (Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate being a rare exception), The Monkey’s Mask was the poetry book of the year in The Age, and also won the National Book Council’s Turnbull Fox Phillips Poetry Prize (the Banjo). When it was published in Britain, by Serpent’s Tail, it was a book of the year in The Times. It was made into a film in 2000, directed by Samantha Lang and starring Susie Porter and Kelly McGillis, and was adapted for BBC radio in 2006.

Although she once described the genre as “an impossible juggling act of narrative and poetry”, Porter wrote three more verse novels: What a Piece of Work (1999) and Wild Surmise (2002), both of which were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. The most recent, El Dorado (2007), about a serial child killer, was shortlisted for numerous awards. Porter continued to publish non-narrative poetry too, and Crete (1996) broke sales records for an Australian poetry collection, even entering the bestsellers’ lists. She was able eventually to make a living from her writing, and was proud never to have accepted a grant from the Arts Council of Australia.

With the success of the verse novels, and the broader audiences they reached, she attracted the interest of several musicians. She wrote the libretti for The Ghost Wife and The Eternity Man, by the composer Jonathan Mills, with the latter being filmed by director Julian Temple for Channel 4. Before she died she completed the first draft of a script for January, a rock opera written by Tim Finn, formerly of the band Split Enz, who has said that he will dedicate the show to Porter when it opens.

Cancer was diagnosed four years ago, but had seemed to be in remission until a few months ago. She told few people of her readmission to hospital: as Goldsmith remarked, “Dot didn't want to be treated as ‘the person with cancer’. ” Although she was not Jewish herself, Porter’s funeral was presided over by a friend, Rabbi Fred Morgan, who described her as “a pagan Jew” and “a wordsmith of the imagination, entertainer, performer, earthy and airy at the same time”.

She is survived by Andrea Goldsmith, Wystan (her blue Burmese cat, named after W. H. Auden) and her parents and sisters.

Dorothy Porter, Australian poet and writer, was born on March 26, 1954. She died of cancer on December 10, 2008, aged 54