Zara McDonald

Zara McDonald is an Australian journalist, broadcaster, and co-founder of Shameless Media. She wrote The Space Between with Michelle Andrews after the pair built the Shameless pop-culture podcast and its community of younger listeners. Viking Australia published the book in 2020 as a collection of reflections on the uncertain years between adolescence and settled adulthood. Its essays consider work, friendship, confidence, ambition, relationships, and the pressure to appear as though every decision has already been made. Penguin's rights material identifies both writers as Melbourne-based journalists who met at Mamamia before launching Shameless in 2018. Their shared authorship is central to the book's conversational character: experiences are compared rather than presented as a single prescription. McDonald and Andrews also narrated the audio edition, carrying the exchange between their podcast work and the printed essays into another form.