Marilla North
Marilla North is a Newcastle-based author, poet and publisher. She founded Yarnspinners Press Collective in 2017 and most recently published Remembering Dorothy.
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Marilla North
Marilla North was born in post-war Newcastle into a family not unlike the working-class clan in Dymphna Cusack’s classic World War II novel Southern Steel (1953), the book that began North’s commitment to 20th-century Australian women writers.
North’s poetry was first published in the Canberra Times (1972). Jacaranda Press published her poetry collection, Blue Glass and Turtles’ Eggs (Milton, Qld,) in 1975. In 1991, North was awarded her MA Honours degree in post-colonial literature from Wollongong University, with a major dissertation on the best-selling WW II saga Come in Spinner.
During the 1990s, she worked as a freelance journalist and lecturer in Australian women’s literature at BU’s Sydney Campus. In 2001 UQP published her “ground-breaking hybrid narrative” Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters ‒ Dymphna Cusack, Miles Franklin and Florence James, which won the 2001 FAW Christina Stead National Prize for Biography. Following a decade living back in Newcastle caring for her mother, in 2014 North was awarded UQ’s Midgley Fellowship to bring her immense biographical research on the life and times of Dymphna Cusack into the digital age.
In 2017 North founded Yarnspinners Press Collective, editing and publishing her fellow word-smiths’ life-story books under the yarn spinning-wheel imprint. The most recent publication, Remembering Dorothy, is a biographical Festschrifte, curated, edited and published in collaboration with Joe Flood, and features 40 eminent contributors celebrating the centenary of Dorothy Hewett’s birth (1923-2023), and the immense contribution she made to Australian Literature.