Maree Giles is an award-winning Australian author, editor, poet, journalist, creative writing teacher and mentor, and the mother of two grown-up children. She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Kingston University London, 2009 – 2010, and is currently a dissertation supervisor on their Creative Writing MFA. She also won first prize in the SHE/ARVON/Little,Brown short story competition, and was a runner-up in the Ian St James Awards.
Maree has more than thirty years experience working with words and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Injustice, family relationships and parenting, friendship, politics, the arts, people and places, all motivate her to write and to teach others about the craft and joys of writing. Her three novels are published by Virago Press, London
Maree moved to the UK in 1980. She has taught creative writing at some of Australia’s top Writing Centres, such as Varuna, the Writer’s House in Katoomba; the Sydney Writer’s Centre, and the NSW Writers’ Centre, and has been a guest speaker at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival and the Sydney Writers’ Festival. She has given talks and readings at many events and on national radio in both countries. She has written for the Evening Star New Zealand, SHE and Parents magazines London, Woman’s Day magazine Australia, and worked at Visnews London and the Bucks Free Press Buckinghamshire.
In between her writing career she worked with underprivileged outback children for the Far West Children’s Health Scheme in Australia. While studying marine biology at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand, she was a research assistant at the Portobello Marine Laboratory, Dunedin. There were other jobs: waitress, trainee psychiatric nurse, receptionist at a Sydney vet’s practice, art teacher at a school for disturbed children in England’s Lake District. All these experiences she believes, enriched her world view and inform her writing. She is working on her fourth novel, and with Australian production company Aquarius Films, on a feature film based on the true-life story of the Forgotten Australians.
The author now lives in south-west France.
- “To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
German philosopher (1844 – 1900)