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Bernadette Brennan

Bernadette Brennan is the award-winning biographer of Helen Garner and Gillian Mears. She is currently researching a literary biography of Drusilla Modjeska.

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A woman with short brown hair in a white suit leaning on a desk and smiling

Bernadette Brennan is a biographer, critic and researcher of contemporary Australian writing. She is the author of a number of publications, including a monograph on Brian Castro and two edited collections: Just Words?: Australian Authors Writing for Justice (UQP 2008), and Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics (Vagabond 2008). In 2017 she published her award-winning literary biography A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work (Text). Her most recent book, Leaping Into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears (A&U 2021), was shortlisted for the 2022 NSW Premier’s Douglas Stewart award and won the Magarey Medal for Biography, the National Biography Award and the Age Book of the Year (non-fiction). Bernadette is currently working on a literary biography of Drusilla Modjeska.

Bernadette Brennan

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