Sophie Cunningham (56 works by)
Gender: Female
Cunningham's sexuality discussed briefly in an article 'Try before you bi' by Claire Hallday and Sophie Radice The Sunday Age 6 June 2004 Agenda p 9-10. The article did not warrant indexing. (JR 7/6/04) Resigning as editor of meanjin Dec 2010 (Sorensen WA 5-6/11/10)

BiographyHistory

During her residency in Sri Lanka (2005), Cunningham planned to complete Dharma is a Girl's Best Friend and to begin research on a third novel, both works responded to Cunningham's interest in the meeting of cultures, people and places. Sophie Cunningham was editor of Meanjin from 2008, resigning from the end of 2010 to return to full-time writing. In 2012, she was appointed chair of the Australia Council's Literature Board.

Awards

2005 Asialink Literature Residency Program Residency in Sri Lanka.
2005 Literature Board Grants — Grants for Developing Writers $15,000 for fiction writing.
2002-2003 Varuna Writers' Retreat Fellowship
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Awards for Works

Melbourne , 2011 prose single work Sophie Cunningham writes a year in the city's life, a year that takes us from the heatwave that culminated on Black Saturday when temperatures soared to 47 degrees to the destructive deluge of a hailstorm. She walks through Melbourne's oldest suburb to its largest market, she goes to the footy and to the comedy festival, she talks publishing and learns how to use a letterpress. Along the way she journeys deep into her own recollections of the city she grew up in, and tells stories from its history: the theft of Picasso's Weeping Woman, the Hoddle Street massacre, William Barak's trek from Healesville, the Westgate Bridge Disaster, the high drama of the 1970 and 2009 AFL grand finals and the Market Murders of the sixties. She strolls by Melbourne's rivers and creeks while considering the history of the wetlands and river that sit at Melbourne's heart. She clambers through the drains that lie beneath. For it is water - the corralling of it, the excess of it, the squandering of it, the lack of it - that defines Melbourne's history, its present and its future (publisher website).
2012 longlisted National Biography Award
Geography , 2004 novel single work
2005 commended International Awards — Commonwealth Writers Prize South East Asia and South Pacific Region Best First Book
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