Nadia Wheatley

Nadia Wheatley

Nadia Wheatley is an Australian writer whose work over four decades has included picture books, novels, biography, memoir and history.

Nadia’s first book, Five Times Dizzy, has been described as the first multicultural children’s book to be published in Australia.

Of the author’s picture books, the best known is the classic My Place, produced in collaboration with illustrator Donna Rawlins. Nadia was also history consultant and script consultant for the 26-part television adaptation of My Place, produced by Matchbox Pictures and the Australian Children’s Television Foundation and released on the ABC.

During the period 1998 to 2001, Nadia Wheatley and artist Ken Searle worked as consultants at the school at Papunya, an Aboriginal community in the Western Desert, Northern Territory. While assisting the Aṉangu staff and students to develop resources for their Indigenous curriculum, they helped produce the multi-award-winning Papunya School Book of Country and History.

Nadia and Ken subsequently used the Papunya Model of Education, with its focus on Learning from Country, as inspiration for a number of illustrated books with a historical and environmental theme.

While many of the author’s books for children and young adults have been honoured in the annual awards of the Children’s Book Council of Australia, in 2014 Nadia was nominated by IBBY Australia for the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing—the highest international recognition given to a living author whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children’s literature.

Also in 2014 the University of Sydney awarded Nadia an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, in recognition of ‘her exceptional creative achievements in the field of literature, her work as an historian and her contribution to our understanding of Indigenous issues, cultural diversity, equity and social justice and the environment through story’.
Nadia’s books for adult readers include The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, the memoir Her Mother’s Daughter, and Radicals—Remembering the Sixties, co-written with Meredith Burgmann.

Nadia lives on the unceded Cadigal/Wangal Country of Sydney’s inner-west, where a number of her earliest books are set.

For more information, please visit: www.nadiawheatley.com