Authors A-Z
Kenneth Mackenzie was the grandson of George Paterson, a member of Alexander Forrest's [1879] Kimberley expedition. He was named Kenneth Ivo Brownley Langwell by his overbearing father, Hugh. His...
Journalist, broadcaster, screenwriter, amateur musicologist, and film and television director.
During the 1960s, Stephen MacLean worked on ABC Television's music show GTK and the surf/...
Born in Adelaide to an Australian/Minangkabau family, Indija has a background in traditional Indonesian dancing and Western dance and theatre. After studying at the Western Australian Academy of...
Kim Mahood is a writer and artist based in Braidwood, NSW. She grew up on the Tanami Downs station and has maintained strong connections with the traditional owners, some of whom worked for her...
After leaving school at the age of 13, Jennifer Maiden worked at a number of jobs before earning a Bachelor of Arts from Macquarie University. A professional writer, she has also taught creative...
Deborah Mailman grew up in Mount Isa. She spent many of her childhood years around the rodeo because her father was a rodeo champion.
Mailman gained interest in acting during high school when she...
Barry Maitland was born in Scotland and grew up in London. After studying architecture at Cambridge, Maitland practised and taught in the UK before moving to Australia, where he became a Professor of...
Kerry Mallan is a Professor in the School of Cultural and Language Studies at the Queensland University of Technology. Her many journal articles and book chapters on aspects of children's literature...
Shane Maloney studied politics and Asian history at the Australian National University and was a director of the Melbourne Comedy Festival. He was appointed an honorary visiting fellow in the School...
David Malouf's paternal family came to Australia in the 1880s from Lebanon. His mother's family, Sephardic Jews from Spain who had gone to England via Holland, migrated to Australia in 1913. Malouf...
Bill Manhire was educated at Otago University and University College, London, UK. He went on to write and publish poetry, and to teach English at Victoria University, New Zealand.
Melina Marchetta was born in Sydney and left school after grade ten to work for a major Australian bank. She later worked as a consultant for a travel company and travelled to England, China, the...
Born in 1947, David Marr grew up and went to school and university in Sydney, New South Wales. Although he is a qualified solicitor and barrister he has never practised law. From 1972, after...
John Marsden was born in Melbourne, the third of four children of Eustace Cullen Hudson and Jeanne Lawler Marsden. He attended Devonport Primary School in Tasmania and Eastwood Primary School and...
Lauren Marsh grew up in Perth and has an interest in women's history.
Originally a graduate of the University of Western Australia in the mid-1960s, Victor Marsh was awarded his PhD at the University of Queensland in about 2006. In between, a varied career path took...
Sophie Masson was born in Indonesia to French parents. Her mother's family came from Northern Portugal, Valencia in Spain and from the Basque region of the Pyrenees; her father's from South West...
Olga Masters was born at Pambula, New South Wales, daughter of Joseph and Dorcas Lawler. She grew up during the 1930s depression and worked as a journalist with the Cobargo Chronicle from the age of...
Mateer is a poet, art critic and practising Buddhist who grew up in an English-speaking family in South Africa and Canada. Prior to being conscripted during 'the State of Emergency' in South Africa,...
Professor of English-language literatures at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium).
Mazzella was born in London to an Irish-Scottish-Burmese mother and an Italian father. She migrated to Perth in the 1960s and has become a prominent performer within the Australian folk music scene...
Ern Malley is the fictitious author of The Darkening Ecliptic, a collection of poems first published in the Autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins. In an attempt to expose the infelicities of the...
Screenwriter
Peter McConchie was born in Melbourne and has worked internationally as a professional photographer for over ten years. He is now based in Australia and his work concentrates on the environment and...
David McCooey is a poet, critic, and academic. In 2009 he was Associate Professor at Deakin University in Geelong, teaching and researching in Literary Studies and Professional and Creative Writing...
Meme McDonald was born in south-west Queensland. She was educated by her mother until entering a boarding school at eight years of age. After high school she spent a year in New York on a cultural...
Willa McDonald has worked as a journalist/writer with the Sydney Morning Herald, Bulletin, the Times on Sunday (formerly the National Times), ABC TV (documentaries) and ABC Radio...
Brian McFarlane has taught for many years at Monash University, his main area of interest being the history of film. Husband of Geraldine McFarlane (q.v.).
Andrew McGahan was born the ninth of ten children on a wheat farm in Dalby, Queensland. His mother was a teacher and their home had a room dedicated to books. He went to the Catholic school in Dalby...
Fiona McGregor has lived in Sydney most of her life. Her short stories have been awarded prizes and widely anthologised. She was voted one of the inaugural Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian...
Mark McKenna has written widely on republicanism and reconciliation in Australia. As well as The Captive Republic (1996) and Looking for Blackfella's Point (2002), he wrote This Country : A...
Philip McLaren was born in Redfern although his family comes from the Warrumbungle Mountain area, New South Wales and he is a descendant of the Kamilaroi people. McLaren has worked as a television...
Greg McLean is a graduate of NIDA. He has written and directed feature films.
Philip Mead was educated primarily in Australia, gaining his B.A.(Honours) from the Australian National University (1975), an M.A., La Trobe University (1981), Dip. Ed., University of Melbourne (1982...
Gillian Mears grew up in north coast towns of New South Wales. She began the study of Archaeology at the University of Sydney but did not finish her degree. She took a position as a laboratory...
Megarrity has worked as a historian and a reviewer.
Since writing the drama The Cake Man, the first black Australian play to be published, televised (1977) and to tour overseas (1982), Robert Merritt has been involved in the production of educational...
After completing his schooling in Melbourne, Metzenthen travelled to New Zealand where he worked in a range of jobs including gardener, grave-digger and hotel porter. On his return to Australia,...
Tjalaminu Mia's father was an Englishman who was placed in the care of Barnados as a child before being shipped to Fairbridge Children's Farm, Western Australia. Mia's Aboriginal mother was removed...
Susan Midalia has studied and taught at the University of Western Australia and, on a Hackett scholarship, studied at Cambridge University. From 1979 to 1981 she was an Editorial Advisor for Westerly...
As a child Alexander McPhee Miller lived in south London, the son of an Irish mother and a Scottish father, whose background he has described as 'culturally rich'. Before migrating alone to Australia...
George Miller is the son of Greek immigrant parents. He attended Ipswich Grammar School, then studied medicine at the University of New South Wales with his twin brother John. While in his final year...
Patti Miller has worked as a teacher of life writing classes and founded the Life Stories Workshops. She has also worked as a manuscript editor.
Dr Peter Minter is a leading Australian poet, editor and scholar, and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, School of Letters, Arts and Media at the University of Sydney. He shares...
Paul Mitchell lived in several small country towns before completing secondary schooling in Geelong. He has a BA in Journalism from RMIT and an MA in Creative Arts (Creative Writing) on the poetry of...
Drusilla Modjeska was born in England, but, after spending some time in New Guinea during the 1960s, she has lived in Australia since 1971. After studying at the Australian National University,...
Tracey Moffatt studied visual communications at the Queensland College of Art and graduated in 1982. The second eldest from a family of five, Tracey and three of her siblings were fostered by a non-...
Justin Monjo is the son of American writer F. N. Monjo, who wrote over twenty children's books. Justin Monjo was born in New York City, and came to Australia in the mid-1980s to study acting at the...
Nicole Moore was born on the Murray River and grew up on the far side of the Hay plain, in the isolated New South Wales town of Balranald. Her father was the town's dry-cleaner and ran the local...
Frank Moorhouse began his writing career as a cadet journalist on the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Later he worked on several country newspapers and became editor of the Australian Worker in 1963. His...
Los Angles, United States, based Australian writer and director.
Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Geonpul woman from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland. Professor Moreton-Robinson has held the position of Convenor in...
Sally Morgan's parents were William Joseph (a plumber) and Gladys Milroy (q.v., a florist). After her father's death, Morgan and her four siblings were raised by her mother and grandmother. Having...
Tony Morphett worked as an interviewer and reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Daily Telegraph, before turning to freelance writing. His first two novels Mayor's Nest (1964...
Encouraged by W. Hart-Smith in 1976, Morris started writing poetry while in Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital's psychiatric ward; Let Me Learn the Steps was published in the following year. Morris has...
Di Morrissey grew up in Pittwater, north of Sydney. After training as a journalist, she worked as a women's editor in Fleet Street, London. Following her marriage to an American diplomat she lived in...
Philip Morrissey worked in the field of Aboriginal arts and cultural administration before taking a position as lecturer in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of...
Kate Morton grew up on Tamborine Mountain in South East Queensland. She has a Licentiate in Speech and Drama from Trinity College London and graduated from the University of Queensland with First...
Matingali Bridget Majital Napanangka is an Elder, artist, and storyteller within the Wirrimanu community in the Tanami Desert of Western Australia.
Mudrooroo was born at East Cubelling (near Narrogin) in Western Australia. At the age of nine he was placed in a Catholic orphanage, where he lived until he was sixteen. He spent a year in Fremantle...
Stephen Muecke grew up in Newcastle and Melbourne. He graduated from Monash University and continued his studies in Paris. After travelling in Europe and North Africa, he returned to Perth to work on...
Born in Geraldton, Kate Mulvany's childhood was interspersed with frequent hospital visits to Perth due to a form of kidney cancer, Wilms' tumour. Back in Geraldton, she mixed happily with the close-...
Marie Munkara is of Rembarranga descent and was born on the banks of the Mainoru River in central Arnhem Land. She went to Nguiu on the Tiwi Islands when she was about eighteen months old, was sent...
'Craig Munro, former publishing manager at UQP, is the author of the award-winning biography Wild Man of Letters : The Story of P.R. Stephensen (1984) and a history of UQP, The Writer's Press (1998...
Gerald Murnane matriculated from De La Salle College, Malvern in 1956. After studying briefly for the priesthood in 1957, he began training as a primary teacher in 1958, subsequently teaching in...
Sally Murphy has written children's fiction books as well as children's educational materials and primary school readers. Sally Murphy was born in Perth, Western Australia and has lived in rural...
From an early age Kirsty Murray loved listening to all types of stories in the school yard and elsewhere. Her father, the sculptor Guy Boyd was a natural storyteller and her mother, Phyllis, was a...
Les Murray grew up on his grandfather's small dairy farm in the close-knit Presbyterian community of Bunyah and attended area schools before matriculating to Sydney University in 1957. Pursuing his...
Joanna Murray-Smith, while predominantly a playwright, has also worked as screenwriter, novelist, librettist and newspaper columnist. Murray-Smith's plays have been well-received in Australia and...
