Delia Falconer
Delia Falconer is the author of three books: two novels and one work of creative nonfiction. Her first novel, the bestselling The Service of Clouds, was shortlisted for major literary awards including the Miles Franklin, NSW Premier Literary Awards, Victorian Premier Literary Awards, and the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year. Her second, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, was shortlisted among other awards for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Asia Pacific Division). Her most recent book is Sydney, a personal history of her hometown, which was shortlisted for seven national awards in history, biography and nonfiction, and won the 2011 ‘Nib’ CAL/Waverley Library Award for outstanding research. Her next book, Signs and Wonders, was published by Simon and Schuster Australia in September 2021. Her short stories and essays have been widely awarded and anthologised, including in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, The Penguin Best Australian Short Stories and various editions of The Best Australian Essays and The Best Australian Stories. In 2009 she was invited to speak and read at Harvard, as part of a week of activities around the US publication by Norton of the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature as The Literature of Australia, in which her work is included. She was editor of The Penguin Book of the Road (2008) and Best Australian Stories (2008 and 2009).
She has acted as a judge and peer adviser for numerous awards and grants, including the Age Book of the Year, RAKA Kate Challis Award for Indigenous Creative Artists, Stella Prize, NSW Premier Literary Awards and the Sydney Morning Herald annual list of Best Young Novelists. She has acted as a peer adviser to the Australia Council and the Australian Society of Authors. She has held a number of grants and residencies, including the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, fellowships at Varuna and Bundanon, and a six-week fellowship from the Australia Council to work at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. As the winner of the James Joyce Suspended Sentence short story competition, 2003, she travelled to Dublin, Trieste and Bejing as the Australian James Joyce Fellow. Her criticism has appeared regularly in The Sydney Review of Books, The Australian, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald, and is frequently linked by international online digests such as 3 Quarks Daily, Arts and Letters Daily, and Bookforum.com. In 2016, she was an invited lecturer in the Catedra John Coetzee: Literaturas del Sur, directed by Nobel Prize for Literature winner John Coetzee, at the University of San Martin, Buenos Aires. In 2018 she was winner of the Walkley Pascall award for arts criticism. In 2019 she was awarded a citation in the UTS Teaching and Learning Awards for her development of creative nonfiction in the Creative Writing Masters degree. Delia holds a PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne.
