Melina Marchetta

Melina Marchetta has been published in more than twenty countries and in eighteen languages. This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of her first novel Looking for Alibrandi, which was made into a major motion picture and won the Australian Film Institute Award (now known as The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards) for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film won a further four AFI Awards including for Best Film, as well as the Film Critics Choice Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the IF Award for best adapted screenplay.

Two of her novels, Saving Francesca and Looking for Alibrandi have won the highly esteemed CBCA Book of the Year. Marchetta’s novel On the Jellicoe Road won the prestigious Michael L. Printz Award from the American Library Association, has sold over 120,000 copies worldwide and is studied in American and Australian schools.

Marchetta wrote the internationally acclaimed fantasy trilogy, The Lumatere Chronicles, in which Finnikin of the Rock, the first novel of the series, won the ABIA Award and the Aurealis Fantasy Award. In 2011, her novel The Piper’s Son was long listed for the Miles Franklin Award. Her latest novel, Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil, was published to critical aclaim in 2016. Melina has also written for the two-time International Emmy nominated televisions series, Dance Academy.