Deborah Robertson is a West-Australian born writer and teacher, now based in Melbourne. Her first book, Proudflesh, won The Steele Rudd Australian Short Story Award, and her first novel, Careless, received the Nita B. Kibble Award for Women Writers and the Colin Roderick Award. It was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, The Age Book of the Year, and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, amongst others. The novel was published in the US and UK, where it was critically acclaimed and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and it is also published in Hebrew and Persian. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologised widely, with her most recent book being a novel, Sweet Old World.

Deborah has a PhD from Murdoch University. She has taught writing – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and criticism – for twenty-eight years, her skills ranging from full-time undergraduate teaching and the supervision of doctoral theses, to the running of workshops for a variety of community groups.

For the past decade, Deborah’s passion for narrative nonfiction has led to her researching and teaching that subject exclusively.

Photo credit: Bleddyn Butcher