Photograph of Carol Lefevre

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

23rd September 2023

An Australian outback childhood, free of the dumbing effect of television, has been my chief inspiration and education. I have written for glossy lifestyle magazines, and my short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in a range of publications, including anthologies by Wakefield Press and Granta, and the literary journals Meanin, Southerly, Westerly, and Overland.

Whatever I happen to be working at, my real job is always writing.

I hold an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, where I am a Visiting Research Fellow. I have taught creative writing in various settings, including several years convening and teaching a Winter School in Travel Writing at the University of Adelaide.

To date I have published eight books, including my first novel Nights In The Asylum, (Vintage, Australia, and Picador, UK, 2007). Nights was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, won the 2008 Nita B. Writers and the 2009 Peoples' Choice Award. If You Were Mine was published by Vintage in 2008.

A non-fiction title, Quiet City: Walking in West Terrace Cemetery was published by Wakefield Press in 2016. This was followed by The Happiness Glass (Spinifex Press, 2018). Murmurations (Spinifex Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Christina Stead Fiction Prize in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and the Fiction Prize in the South Australian Festival Awards for Literature.

In 2022 I published both The Tower (Spinifex Press) and The Silver Moth (Lion Hudson, UK), the latter an authorised sequel to Elizabeth Goudge's classic children's novel The Little White Horse, which was a favourite of my own childhood.

In 2016 I was the recipient of the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. I am an associate member of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, and in 2017 I was awarded a Writing Fellowship at the Centre.

My most recent book is a novel, Temperance (Wakefield Press, August 2023).