AustLit logo
Sarah Armstrong Sarah Armstrong i(A82379 works by)
Born: Established: 1968 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

BiographyHistory

Sarah Armstrong has been a reporter with ABC Radio and a researcher and producer for ABC Television. She has won a Walkley award for her journalism. In 2000, Armstrong moved to a rainforest area near Byron Bay to pursue writing and yoga teaching.

Sarah Armstrong was born in Sydney, Australia in 1968 and grew up in the New South Wales towns of Armidale, Gosford and Newcastle. Her family had no TV for most of her childhood and she was a prolific (if somewhat undiscerning) reader. The Armstrongs' weekly trips to the local library were legendary. Her parents, a psychologist and psychotherapist, helped bring Gestalt therapy to Australia in the late 1970's.

At the age of fifteen Armstrong went to live in Argentina for a year as an exchange student. She lived in the foothills of the Andes with a family who spoke no English. After graduating from Mitchell College, Bathurst with a BA in Communications, she joined ABC Radio as a trainee journalist, working on the flagship current affairs programs AM, The World Today and PM. In 1993 she won Australia's premier journalistic award, the Walkley, for a radio feature on diggers returning to Gallipoli. She joined ABC TV's Foreign Correspondent program as a researcher and field producer. Highlights of her time with Foreign Correspondent include an audience with Libya's Colonel Gadaffi, landing in the sub-Saharan town of Timbuktu in a sand storm and swimming in a jellyfish lake in Palau.

In 1997 she realised that the demands of journalism would always keep her from writing seriously so she resigned from the ABC and moved to the north coast of New South Wales. The year she moved into a small rustic cabin in an overgrown rainforest valley it rained relentlessly for several months, providing inspiration for her first novel Salt Rain.

One of her short stories, 'The Long Wet', has been made into a short film by Tristan Bancks, a Byron Bay filmmaker.

Armstrong has taugh writing classes and Writing and Yoga workshops around Australia and in Bali.

Source: The author's web site: www.sarah-armstrong.com

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2023 recipient Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships Arts Projects for Individuals and Groups $14,300
2005 Australia Council Literature Board Grants Grants for Developing Writers $25,000 for fiction writing.

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Big Magic Richmond : Hardie Grant Children's Publishing , 2022 23806874 2022 single work children's fiction children's fantasy

'When a circus trick goes horribly wrong and star magician Merry disappears in front of her daughter, Tulsi, everyone believes Merry’s gone forever. But then 11-year-old Tulsi discovers one tiny, impossible sliver of hope for bringing her mother back: If Tulsi learns enough Big Magic ;before the next full moon, she just might be able to rescue Merry by travelling to a parallel universe – a world where Tulsi has never been born, and which holds the key to saving their circus.

'There are reasons it's all but impossible: It can take a lifetime to learn Big Magic. Tulsi has never done any magic at all. And the only person who can teach her is her estranged grandmother, Sylvie – a strange, unlikeable woman who was banned for fifteen years from doing Big Magic herself.' (Publication summary)

2023 CBCA Book of the Year Awards Notable Book Younger Readers
2019 winner Affirm Press Mentorship Award as manuscript.
y separately published work icon Salt Rain Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2004 Z1121694 2004 single work novel

When fourteen-year-old Allie's mother, Mae, mysteriously disappears in the dark waters of the harbor, Allie begrudgingly sets off with Julia, an aunt she barely knows, to stay at the dairy farm where her mother grew up. As the days pass and the heat of the wet season swells, Allie waits for her mother's call, certain that she will reappear. While Julia - determined to undo the damage her family has inflicted upon the land - replants the trees of the forest, Allie lurks around the cabin belonging to her mother's first love, a man who still lives deep within the valley. But when the truth about Mae's childhood and Allie's mythical father, the balloon man, begins to surface, Allie must come to grips with the lies her mother has told her and the secrets buried within the mud-rich landscape. Source: Book Jacket

2005 shortlisted Queensland Premier's Literary Awards Best Fiction Book
2005 shortlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award
Last amended 25 Aug 2023 13:06:37
Other mentions of "" in AustLit:
    X