I am an Australian American author of Liar, My Sister Rosa and six other novels. Published in twelve countries, Liar is currently optioned by Blue Ant Media and Ellen Pompeo’s Calamity Jane Productions. In Australia, my books have won the Adelaide Festival Award, the Western Australia Premier’s Award, the Christina Stead Award, and the Aurealis, Davitt and Ditmar awards. In the USA, I’ve won the Andre Norton Award, the Carl Brandon Kindred Award, and been shortlisted for the Locus, Anthony, and Edgar awards. Her books have been named ALA, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year.

I’m also a vintage fashion obsessive and (very) part-time model, who has worked with the Chelsea Flea, the Manhattan Vintage Show, the Sturbridge Show, Gem.app, and various independent designers. I share my thoughts on getting dressed, Elsa Schiaparelli and the glories of vintage silk, cotton and linen on Instagram.

My most recent, My Sister Rosa, is about a seventeen-year-old boy whose ten-year-old sister is a psychopath. It is published by Allen and Unwin in Australia and New Zealand and by Soho Press in North America. My previous novel is Razorhurst, which takes place on a winter’s day in 1932 when Dymphna Campbell, a gangster’s moll, and Kelpie, a street urchin who can see ghosts, meet over the dead body of Dymphna’s latest lover, Jimmy Palmer.

My most popular novel, Liar, is kind of self explanatory, i.e. it’s about a liar. I edited Zombies versus Unicorns with Holly Black. My other novels include How to Ditch Your Fairy and the Magic or Madness trilogy.

In another life I was an academic and edited a scholarly collection of feminist science fiction in the twentieth century, Daughters of Earth and wrote a scholary tome, The Battle of The Sexes in Science Fiction.

I’ve written a short film about the legend of King Midas, as well as essays on American science fiction culture in the 1940s and 1950s, with detours into Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the occasional short story. I co-wrote a radio show about relationship breakups with Ellen Kushner.

I am a Sydney girl. Though I have lived in other parts of Australia, courtesy of my anthropologist parents, including Newcastle, Canberra, and two small Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory. I now mostly live in New York City with occasional returns to Sydney.