Kate Grenville

A Room Made of Leaves presents itself as a secret memoir by Elizabeth Macarthur, who sailed to New South Wales with her difficult husband John and whose surviving letters give away almost nothing about him or about herself. Kate Grenville built the novel out of one phrase in that correspondence, "I blush at my error", reading it as a crack in the mask of propriety. Grenville, born in Sydney in 1950, took an honours degree at Sydney and a creative writing master's at Colorado. The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2001, and The Secret River took the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and a Booker shortlisting in 2006. A Room Made of Leaves won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the 2021 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and reached the Walter Scott Prize shortlist. She was appointed an Officer in the Order of Australia in 2018.