Christie Nieman is an author, essayist, anthology editor, parent, playwright, and librarian. Her latest novel Where We Begin, set on Dja Dja Wurrung country where she lives and works, fits the bill of ‘Australian contemporary gothic’ and won a Davitt Award and a CBCA Honour Book Award and was shortlisted for both the Victorian and NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Early in her career after her play Call Me Komachi was shortlisted for a Green Room Award she won an Asialink playwrights residency to Japan where she read Kaidan stories, traditional Japanese folk tales of the strange and supernatural, an influence later seen in her novel As Stars Fall. Whether writing novels, essays, short fiction, plays, opinion, or prose poems, her words concern themselves with women and bodies and social structures and human relationships with the environment. Her essay on human exceptionalism and the nature of storytelling, When the Clay Has You, was a feature of The Sydney Review of Books’ New Nature Series. She is also one of the editors responsible for the feminist anthologies Just Between Us, Mothers and Others, and 2019’s #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement. She is a fan of science and has studied a little bit of ecology and biology but she is an actual doctor of creative literatures and ecocriticism, though she finds the title a bit heavy to carry around and so is usually happy to just leave it at home unless she is defending the honour of women with doctorates everywhere and then she shouts it from the rooftops. She lives on the land of the Djaara people with her husband and two kids, a whole host of wild birds, and two very fluffy chooks.