Robyn Cadwallader
Robyn Cadwallader is an ex-academic and writer who lives in Ngunnawal country outside Canberra. She has published poems, prize-winning short stories and reviews, a poetry collection, i painted unafraid and a non-fiction book based on her PhD thesis about virginity and female agency in the Middle Ages. In response the government’s punitive treatment of asylum seekers, she edited collection of essays on asylum seeker policy, We Are Better Than This (2015).
Her first novel, The Anchoress (2015, Fourth Estate Australia, Faber & Faber, UK, Farrer, Straus & Giroux, US, and Gallimard France) was published internationally, and received with critical acclaim. It was awarded a Canberra Critics’ Circle Award for fiction, Highly Commended in the ACT Book of the Year Award, and was nominated for the Indie Book Awards, the Adelaide Festival Literary Awards, and the ABIA Awards. Her second novel, Book of Colours (Fourth Estate, 2018) won the 2019 ACT Book of the Year Award, a Canberra Critics Award and was shortlisted for the Voss Award. The Fire and the Rose (Fourth Estate, 2023), her third novel, was nominated for the ARA Historical Fiction Award.
Why I’m interested in mentoring:
As writers, we are all always learning, and every project has its own particular challenges. I’m interested in mentoring because I can be someone to walk alongside a writer, to offer encouragement and share some of my experience of the craft. Above all, it is the writer’s work, and I would aim to help them discover what their story wants to be.
My areas of interest are: literary fiction; historical fiction; writing the body, using the senses; the use of detail; attention at the level of the sentence; point of view.
