My story

Since the age of six, when a story of mine about the sinking of the Titanic appeared in my school magazine, I have only wanted to write. Born in Sydney in 1966, I grew up in Guyra in rural New South Wales. After six years in a boys' boarding school I worked as a bank teller before hitchhiking 3000 km around Europe. From 1987 to 1998 I lived in Canberra, where I studied writing at the University of Canberra. In 1999 I moved to Melbourne, and as part of a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Melbourne I wrote my first published novel, The Zookeeper's War (2007). 

Cleaner, waiter, barman, life model, taxi driver, public servant, university tutor and book reviewer are some of the jobs with which I have supported my writing.

In 2008 The Zookeeper's War won the inaugural Australian Prime Minister's Award for fiction, then worth $100,000. The novel was published in the UK and Ireland and translated into Spanish. The Tolstoy Estate (2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Age Book of the Year and the 2021 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The book has also been published in translation in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy.

In 2013 I became a parent and moved to Port Fairy in the southwest of Victoria. I now live in the nearby town of Koroit and divide my time between writing, working part-time as a pathology courier driver, and co-parenting a charismatic and exuberant son with non-verbal autism.