Author: Georgina Banks

Georgina Banks is an Australian writer, facilitator, and former performer whose first book, Back to Bangka, joins family memoir with historical investigation. Born in Sydney, she studied acting at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse and later appeared with Australian theatre companies and on television. She subsequently studied applied psychology and developed a consulting practice focused on change within people and organisations. Viking published Back to Bangka in 2023 after a memorial invitation prompted Banks to examine the fate of her great-aunt Dorothy "Bud" Elmes, an Australian Army nurse lost during the Second World War. The narrative follows Banks through Indonesia and Australian archives as she reconstructs the Bangka Island story and considers how grief and silence travel through generations. Penguin classifies the book as memoir, while an ABC interview places its creation within Banks's long engagement with storytelling, performance, and social justice. That combination of personal connection and documentary inquiry gives her debut its distinctive authority.