Featured Writers

On the event of her passing, I had a stark realisation (one seen only through clouding tears): that Carrie Fisher was my mental health icon, for at least a decade, if not longer. I am fast coming up to a decade of living with a diagnosis of Bipolar II, something I don't really think (or talk or write or tweet) about anymore – although here we are – because I’m so well medicated and supported that I sort of stink of sane.

If you’d told me two years ago that I’d soon be the author of a picture book published in over ten countries, I’d have laughed.

I loved creative writing in school, and had won numerous writing competitions including an international poetry competition run by the Vatican, but I was eventually convinced that it wasn’t going to lead to any kind of career. I studied one year of journalism instead, but dropped out to do a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Arabic, and a Graduate Diploma of Teaching. It was a long, fun and interesting road

We all live in the internet. We see it, we breathe it, we create our lives in it. But it's changing and growing all the time, in big ways we can perceive, and in small ways we can’t.

For the 2016 Digital Writers' Festival, emerging writer Jessica Knight was part of an innovative and informative live streamed session titled 'The Internet We Imagine.' The panel...

Can you tell me how being a woman writer has influenced your work?

And then, I feel it: on the women’s writing panel at every Australian festival. The momentary confusion. The invisibility. And sometimes, the anger and the grief. Mostly, I qualify the question. I’m a black woman writer, making work in Australia, for a largely white audience. Overtly political work. Most of my characters are black, and disenfranchised men and women. I can’t really think about being a woman writer, in isolation from that.

What I mean is: I don’t really understand your question. What I mean is:...