Jenny Blackford
, b. 1957
Jenny Blackford is a writer of speculative and historical fiction, both for adults and children. Born in Sydney, she studied Classics, Sanskrit and German at the University of Newcastle, where she began a PhD on comparative religions.She has also worked as a systems engineer for the technology company IBM. Her writing for young readers has appeared in Australia’s longest running literary magazine for children, The School Magazine, as well as the Random House Australia anthologies Stories for Seven Year-olds and Stories for Nine Year-olds, first published in 2011. In 2009 Hadley Rille Books commissioned her to write The Priestess and the Slave, an archaeologically accurate novel set in Athens and Delphi during the 5th century BCE. In 2016 she won a Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto Short Story Award for Cooking up a Murder, a short story set in ancient Delphi with a priestess of Apollo as an amateur detective. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications and her work has been recognised with a number of awards, including the Humorous Verse section of the Henry Lawson Awards (2014 and 2017) and the New England Thunderbolt Prize (2017). Her most recent collection of poetry, The Loyalty of Chickens, was published in 2017.
Bio prepared by Miriam Riverlea, University of New England, mriverlea@gmail.com
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