My first novel, TIME FUTURE, won the 1999 George Turner Award for best unpublished sf/fantasy manuscript. This book and the sequel, TIME PAST, have been described by Melbourne Age reviewer Lucy Sussex as "feminist space opera", a label I wear proudly. My third book, LESS THAN HUMAN, won the 2004 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and has been nominated for a Ditmar Award. LESS THAN HUMAN is a thriller set in near-future Japan, featuring the adventures of a gaijin robotics engineer and a Japanese detective as they clash with a cult that uses computers to escape the Wheel of Suffering.

I have written a number of short stories and articles, appeared at Brisbane and Tasmanian Writers Festivals, was a Board member of the ACT Writers Centre in 2004, and am a member of the Writers on the Rise novel critiquing group. I was a Special Guest at Conflux II convention in 2005. In 2002 I received an Asialink Literature Residency to Japan, where I spent time researching my present project--a fantasy set in medieval Japan, which I am submitting as my thesis in a Masters program at the Queensland University of Technology. I also received an ArtsACT grant in 2003 to write a children's fantasy. This book is scheduled to be published by ABC Books as part of the Lost Shimmaron series.

After living in Japan for 16 years from 1980 to 1996 I returned to Australia and settled in Canberra, which gave me an interesting perspective on the '80s and a major culture shock upon returning to Australia. I began writing science fiction partly because early conditioning in the genre made it unlikely I would have written anything else, and partly because nobody was writing what I wanted to read: a realistic female protagonist in a whodunnit-type narrative with a space opera background.

My day job is a research assistant at the Australian National University, Canberra, and my main hobbies are horseriding and watching the chooks dig up what's left of the garden.