Dr Jessica White

Jessica writes in the genres of fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir. Her first novel, A Curious Intimacy (Penguin/Viking 2007) won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, shortlistings for the Western Australia Premier's award and the Dobbie award for a first published work by an Australian woman writer, and was longlisted for the international Dublin Literary Award award. Her second novel, Entitlement, was published by Penguin/Viking in 2012. Jessica's most recent work, Hearing Maud (UWA Publishing 2019), is a hybrid memoir about deafness. It won the 2020 Michael Crouch award for debut biography, and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the National Biography Award, and the People's Choice Award and Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance in the Queensland Literary Awards. Jessica's short fiction, essays and poetry have won awards and shortlistings and appeared in national and international literary journals. Jessica is also the recipient of funding and residencies from Arts Queensland, the Australia Council for the Arts, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and the IASH Environmental Humanities group at the University of Edinburgh.

Jessica's critical writing has been published in national and international journals in the fields of Australian literature, ecocriticism, nineteenth century literature, life writing and literary representations of disability. From 2016-2019 she was an Australia Research Council DECRA fellow at The University of Queensland, during which time she oversaw the creation of the Writing Disability in Australia dataset in the AustLit database to draw attention to representations of disability in Australian literature. Jessica is currently working on two books: an ecobiography about Western Australia botanist Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843) and the plants that transformed her life, and a scholarly monograph on the genre of ecobiography.

Jessica is keen to supervise in the fields of either creative or critical writing, particularly Australian literature, ecocriticism, climate fiction, literature and disability, fiction, memoir and creative non-fiction.

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy University of London

• Master of Arts in Writing University of Technology, Sydney

• Bachelor of Arts (Honours) University of Wollongong