Programmes Beyond the Centre

Introduction

Residences may also be arranged to include a local or visiting author and/or illustrator to work with your students. Please contact Centre Staff for further information.

Raewyn Caisley

Raewyn Caisley 

Raewyn Caisley was born in New Zealand but has lived in Australia for the past 20 years, zig zagging back and forth between Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane. She now lives in Fremantle with her husband, Terry, son, Jack, and their cat that has the highly original name of Ginger Fish.

Raewyn loves being a writer, especially a children’s writer. “It’s wonderful being able to make children smile, to see their imaginations awakening and hopefully inspire them. And imagine having a job that you can go anywhere you like – the beach, your favourite chair, under a tree. Once or twice I’ve found myself looking up from the page at lunchtime only to discover I’m still in my pyjamas…”
Elaine Forrestal

Elaine Forrestal 

Elaine Forrestal is an award-winning author of fiction titles for young readers and young adults. She has been writing stories and poems since she was in primary school. Born in Perth, Western Australia, Elaine grew up in small wheatbelt towns. After travelling the world and teaching for many years she now lives in Scarborough with her husband, Peter, and their beagle, Fling.

Website: www.elaineforrestal.com.au
Mark Greenwood

Mark Greenwood 

Mark Greenwood is an author and musician whose books and songs have been published internationally. His recent writing is occupied with stories about characters, journeys, quests and challenges. He is drawn to well-known and little known slices of history where themes like courage, freedom, and determination play an important role in defining our past.

The Legend of Moondyne Joe, The Legend of Lasseter's Reef, Fortuyn’s Ghost, Simpson and His Donkey and Ned Kelly and the Green Sash aim to encourage an appreciation of Australia's unique myths and legends.

Website: www.markgreenwood.com.au
Guundie Kuchling

Guundie Kuchling 

Guundie Kuchling has a fine arts degree from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She is a painter, print maker, sculptor, and picture book creator and lives in Perth, with fish and turtles, and three pet rats. Of course, there is also her husband, Gerald. He has saved Australia's most endangered turtle, the Western Swamp Tortoise, from the brink of extinction, and Guundie has been helping him all along with field work.

Guundie says: “The real magic of writing comes from inside. It is my feelings and thoughts about the natural world that inspire me. All my work is designed to celebrate life in all its strange and amazing forms – turtles, dung beetles, megaworms, fleas, and that’s just the beginning.”

Website: www.guundie.com
Frané Lessac

Frané Lessac 

Frané Lessac has over 30 award winning children's books published throughout the world. Her greatest ambition is to instill pride and self esteem in children about their own unique heritage and their ability to capture it in pictures and words.

Born in New Jersey, Frané Lessac loves to travel and to work on books based on her worldwide journeys. "I try to portray the people and places of these countries to children in a sensitive, accurate, and educational way."

Frané studied at the New School for Social Research in New York City, the University of Southern California, and Ethnographic Film at UCLA in California. A number of her paintings are part of private collections worldwide and have been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London.

Website: www.franelessac.com
Deborah Lisson

Deborah Lisson 

Deborah Lisson was born in Croydon, England, and came to Australia as a migrant in 1962. Nearly all of Deborah's books have had an historical theme. She says she enjoys the detective work involved in researching historical novels and the challenge of 'bringing the past to life' for young readers. Though she sees herself primarily as a 'storyteller', there is also an important theme running through Deborah's work. She believes in the saying that 'those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them,' and invites her readers to draw parallels between the events portrayed in her books and those occurring in the world today.

Website: www.geo.net.au/~lissond
Liliana Stafford

Liliana Stafford 

“Writing is like breathing, it is present in everything I do and the stuff of stories is drawn from the normal everyday things that happen. Ideas come when I take the time to live life slowly and approach the world with an open mind.”

Animals and the natural environment have always been an important part of Liliana Stafford’s life and for many years she lived on small rural properties and taught horse riding. She began writing seriously after the death of a beautiful welsh mountain pony called Chiko. Liliana is discovering the joy of being both writer and illustrator, working in tissue paper collage and encaustic wax.

Website: www.lilianastafford.com
Katy Watson-Kell

Katy Watson-Kell 

After leaving high school at fifteen, Katy Watson-Kell talked her way into a smorgasbord of mind-numbing jobs where she surreptitiously read magazines and novels, drew unflattering portraits of her bosses and daydreamed - the perfect incubation for a frustrated writer in waiting.  She has written two novels for young adults, juice and mama’s trippin’ and is developing a third YA novel set in the 1970s.  She is also working on a picture book concept exploring the mysterious life of lone scout, Seaforth McKenzie, the King of Penguin Island. 

Katy lives with her family in Shoalwater, Western Australia.

Website: www.katywatson-kell.com.au