Nadia Wheatley by Crico, 2015. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (accessed: December 15, 2021).
Nadia Wheatley
, b. 1949
Nadia Wheatley was born in Sydney in 1949. She has written extensively for children and young adults, in addition to her work as an historian, researcher and biographer. She began to write seriously during the 1970s whilst living in Crete and on the Peloponnese. Many of her works explore Australia’s multicultural identity. My Place (1988), illustrated by Donna Rawlins, traces a Sydney house back in time in decade-long intervals to before the time of white settlement, charting the changes and continuities of the site. Her most recent publication, Australians All (2014), charts the history of Australia from the Ice Age to then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations, through the perspective of young people.
The short story anthology The Night Tolkien Died, in which “Melting Point” features, was recognised as an Honour Book by the Children’s Book Council of Australia in 1995. In addition to the numerous awards her books have received, Wheatley’s contribution to children’s literature was honoured with a nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 2014.
In recent years, Wheatley has worked with an Aboriginal community in the Western Desert of the Northern Territory to develop Indigenous teaching resources. Playground – Stories from Country and from Inside the Heart (2011) is a compilation of autobiographical stories from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, with a focus on the themes of childhood and education.
Sources:
Official website (accessed: June 28, 2018).
Contact (accessed: January 11, 2017).
Bio prepared by Miriam Riverlea, University of New England, mriverlea@gmail.com
Records in database:
