Photo: Tammy de Zilva
I was raised in northwestern NSW on Gamilaroi country and, at age 4, lost most of my hearing from bacterial meningitis. Being a determined little girl, I made my way from a tiny school of 100 pupils to publishing my first novel at age 29, before graduating with a PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies from Birkbeck, University of London.
My first novel, A Curious Intimacy, was published by Penguin in 2007, and won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award. It was shortlisted for the Western Australia Premier's award and the Dobbie award for a first book by a woman writer, and longlisted for the international Dublin Literary Award. My second novel, Entitlement, was published by Penguin in September 2012.
My hybrid memoir, Hearing Maud, which details the entwinement of my life with that of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th Century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed, was published by UWA Publishing in 2019. It won the 2020 Michael Crouch award for a debut biography, and was shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Literary Award and two categories in the Queensland Literary Awards. My essay collection Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays will be published by Upswell in October 2025. I am currently writing an ecobiography of 19th century botanist Georgiana Molloy, Western Australia’s first non-Indigenous female scientist.
Together with author Dr Amanda Niehaus, I co-founded Science Write Now, an online journal of creative writing and art inspired by science.
I have received funding from the Australia Research Council, Creative Australia, Arts Queensland, Arts South Australia and the Copyright Agency. I have been selected for residencies at Creative Australia's BR Whiting Studio in Rome, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment in Munich, Varuna in the Blue Mountains, the Whitlam Residency at Gough Whitlam’s house in Cabramatta, the Writers Near the Reef Residency at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Townsville, and the Island and Ridgeline Pottery residency in Tasmania. My short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in literary journals including Review of Australian Fiction, Overland, Meanjin, Island, Griffith Review, Southerly and the Sydney Review of Books, as well as a range of academic publications.
I live on Kaurna country in Adelaide, and research and teach at the University of South Australia. You can read more about my work-in-progress, and my research more generally, on my Research page.