Maree giles biography

Maree Giles is an award-winning Australian writer, poet, journalist, creative writing teacher and mentor.
Sitting down for a conversation with award-winning author, poet, journalist and teacher, Maree Giles.
Maree Giles was born in Penrith, New South Wales.

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Maree Giles is an award-winning Australian author, editor, poet, journalist, creative writing teacher and mentor, the mother of two grown-up children, and a Parramatta Girls' Home survivor, who now lives in Toulouse in sunny south-west France. Maree has taught creative writing at some of Australia’s top Writing Centres and been a guest speaker at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival and the Sydney Writers’ Festival. We met on Twitter.

• Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

I was born in Penrith, New South Wales, when it was just a one-horse town, although I remember nothing about it. Not long after I was born my mother left my father, as he was involved with another woman. We went to live in Cronulla, on the edge of Gunnamatta Bay, with my grandmother, Daisy Entwistle. When I was six we moved to North Narrabeen, to a house overlooking Narrabeen Lagoon on the edge of Garrigal National Park and not far from the beach. It was an idyllic childhood but I was a

North Narrabeen

solitary child. I think this was good training for being a

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Maree Giles is an award-winning Australian writer, poet, journalist, creative writing teacher and mentor. She has two children and four grand-children. She lives in London and divides her time between the UK and Australia. She has also lived in the United States, New Zealand, and France.

Maree was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Kingston University London, 2009 – 2010, and a dissertation supervisor on their Creative Writing MFA. Maree launched her career as a fiction writer after winning first prize in the prestigious 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. Australia is the main setting for her books. 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 novels are published by Virago Press, London, and Hachette Australia.

Maree moved to the UK in 1980 and more recently spent e

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Listen to Maree’s talk about Parramatta Girls Home to staff at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra on February 17th, 2011.

Read an article written by Maree and published in the November 2010 issue of Australian PEN Magazine – you will find it on page 12 in the online PDF version of the magazine.

Listen to Valerie Khoo at the Sydney Writers’ Centre interviewing Maree about her work as a writer.

Ramona Koval talks to Maree on The Book Show, ABC Radio National

Read about Maree’s work as a writer and creative writing teacher on HER CIRCLE EZINE

Richard Aedy interviews Judy Divargue and Maree Giles about their experience inside Parramatta Girls’ Home on Life Matters, ABC Radio National

Invisible Thread

New Internationalist, Sept, 2001 by Peter Whittaker

by Maree Giles (Virago, ISBN 860498868)

Maree Giles’s publishers describe her first novel Invisible Thread as ‘semi-autobiographical’ and ‘based on a true story’ – neither of which is necessarily a recommendation, as such phrases are often used to