Joanne Fedler

Joanne Fedler is an author, writing mentor, publisher and ocean swimmer. She has lived on the unceded Gadigal land of the Eora nation in Australia since 2001, having immigrated from South Africa. She has been writing stories since she was six, and at 14 her father gave her Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, which, she says, centred her "like clay on a wheel."

Before her writing life took its current shape, she earned a master's degree in law from Yale, set up and ran a not-for-profit advocacy centre to end violence against women in South Africa, and sat on the South African Law Commission to help draft new domestic violence legislation. She is also an environmental activist and supports organisations working to protect marine life and ecosystems.

Her 15th book, The Whale's Last Song, grew out of the grief of losing her mother in 2021. Bring Us Home from Sorrow is an intimate portrait of that loss, and of the ways distance, disease and death keep us apart from those we love. It is also a celebration of ocean swimming through bereavement, a practice she took up after a back injury.

Each year Joanne runs writing retreats and mentors a handful of writers. She has developed her own creative process, taught in her workshops, retreats and online courses. Its premise is that we can only take a reader as far as we have gone ourselves, so our values and beliefs matter to the craft. In 2017 she created Joanne Fedler Media, a publishing company for books by the authors she mentors.