Melina Marchetta

Marchetta left school at fifteen, went back as an adult, and taught English in Sydney for a decade while writing. Looking for Alibrandi, published in 1992, follows an Italian-Australian girl through her final school year, a father she has never met and a classmate she loses, and it became a set text in Australian schools. On the Jellicoe Road is deliberately disorienting for its first hundred pages, which readers either abandon or decide was worth it. Her later work moves between teenage fiction, fantasy and crime.