Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of over sixteen books for adults and children, including the ABIA and Indie award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the NSW Premier’s award-winning bestselling memoir The Hate Race, the self-illustrated picture book When We Say Black Lives Matter, which was longlisted for the UK’s Kate Greenaway medal, and the CBCA Honour Book The Patchwork Bike (illustrated by Van T Rudd), which won the 2019 Boston Globe Horn Prize for Best Picture Book.

Her poetry collections include Carrying the World, which won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, How Decent Folk Behave, It’s the Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people, which won the 2024 ABIA for Book of the Year for Younger Readers, and Beautiful Changelings, which was shortlisted for the 2026 South Australian Literary Awards. Maxine was the inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne from 2023 to 2025. Her most recent book is a verse novel for children, Sagittarius Rising (illustrated by Jade Goodwin).

Maxine has a background in copyright law and has freelanced for newspapers, publications and literary journals including The Guardian, The Age, The Saturday Paper, Australian Art Collector, The Big Issue, Vogue, Meanjin and Overland. She has been a grant assessor for many organisations, including Creative Australia, Creative Victoria, The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Fellowship, and The Copyright Agency’s annual author fellowship. She is the editor of the books Growing up African in Australia (2019), and Best Australian Stories 2017, and edition 121 of Cordite Poetry Review (2026).