Anh Do

Anh Do was two years old when his family left Vietnam in a leaking fishing boat, a five day crossing that nearly finished them and that opens The Happiest Refugee, the 2010 memoir he wrote after years on the Australian stand-up circuit. It took Book of the Year at the 2011 Australian Book Industry Awards and the Indie Award for best Australian book, and it does not soften what came later: the family's duck farming venture collapsed, his father drank, turned violent and was put out of the house, and Anh was thirteen. He studied business law at UTS in Sydney, turned down legal work for comedy, and co-wrote the film Footy Legends with his brother Khoa Do. He is now among Australia's biggest selling children's writers, with the WeirDo, Ninja Kid and Wolf Girl series. The Great Escape is the second Wolf Girl book, illustrated on every page by Jeremy Ley: Gwen, cut off from her family, stays alive in the wild with a pack of dogs. Do paints too, has been an Archibald Prize finalist, and presented the ABC portrait series Anh's Brush with Fame from 2016.