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Susan Johnson Susan Johnson i(A32697 works by) (birth name: Susan Ruth Johnson)
Born: Established: 1956 Brisbane, Queensland, ;
Gender: Female
Expatriate assertion
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BiographyHistory

Susan Johnson grew up on Sydney's north shore, finishing school in Brisbane and starting work as a cadet journalist with the Courier Mail. After three years, she joined the Australian Women's Weekly in Sydney, and worked there for a year, from 1977 to 1978, before spending a year travelling in Europe.

On her return to Australia, Johnson worked for Sydney's Sun-Herald, the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. From 1999 to 2001 she was editor of 'Saturday Extra' for The Age in Melbourne. She has edited anthologies of short stories, written fiction, and contributed to several newspapers and magazines. In 1987 and 1988 she won Literature Board Fellowships and has been offered two residencies at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1989. Johnson has taught creative writing in Hong Kong, London and Australia.

Johnson's writing explores such themes as the complexity of romantic and intergenerational relationships, finding a sense of fulfilment through work and the difficulty of discovering a sense of life purpose and direction.

Johnson has lived for some years in Hong Kong and London. In early 2008 she took out British citizenship. (Johnson also retains her Australian citizenship.)

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • In The Bibliography of Australian Literature: F-J (University of Queensland Press, 2005), the novel Forbidden (New York: Bantam, 1991) was listed as a work by this author. However, it has now been established that it is by a North American author with the same name.

Personal Awards

2021 recipient Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships Individuals and Groups
2013 recipient Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships New Work - Established Writers Fiction

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Aphrodite's Breath : A Memoir Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2023 25667067 2023 single work autobiography

'What happens when you take your 85-year-old mother to live with you on a Greek island? A strikingly original, funny, and forensic examination of love and finding home from the author of From Where I Fell

'In life, as in myth, women are the ones who are supposed to stay home like Penelope, weaving at their looms, rather than leaving home like Odysseus. Meet eighty-five-year-old Barbara and her sixty-two-year-old writer daughter Susan, who asked her mother—on a whim—if she wanted to accompany her to live on the Greek island of Kythera.

'What follows is a moving unravelling of the mother–daughter relationship told in poetic, irresistible prose.

'Aphrodite's Breath is a strikingly original, funny and forensic examination of love and finding home, amid the stories of the people, olives and wonders of the birthplace of Aphrodite.' (Publication summary) 

2024 longlisted APA Book Design Awards Best Designed Non Fiction Book
2023 longlisted Mark and Evette Moran Nib Award for Literature
y separately published work icon From Where I Fell Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2021 20850071 2021 single work novel

'An anguished email from Pamela Robinson in Australia to her ex-husband in Paris accidentally ends up in the inbox of New York State teacher Chrisanthi Woods. Chrisanthi is sympathetic to Pamela's struggles and the women begin to tell each other the stories and secrets of their lives.

'Pamela, responsible for raising her three sons, must re-invent the meaning of home following her divorce, and Chrisanthi, her dreams long dampened, must find home by leaving it. Temperamental opposites, their emails turn into an exhilarating and provocative exchange of love, loss and fresh beginnings, by turns amusing, frank and confronting.' (Publication summary)

2022 shortlisted Voss Literary Prize
2021 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards The Courier-Mail People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year
y separately published work icon The Landing Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2015 8828967 2015 single work novel

'Jonathan Lott, recently divorced, is about to find how much love really matters in a funny, delightful and poignant novel that lays out the human condition - looking for love in all of its many forms with secrets, polite lies, desperation, compromise and joy.

Jonathan Lott is confused. His wife has left him for a woman and he doesn't like living alone. Is it true that an about-to-be-divorced man in possession of a good fortune is in need of a new wife? Would Penny Collins do, divorced herself, school teacher and frustrated artist? What about beautiful Anna, blown in from who knows where, trailing broken marriages behind her? There's a lot happening at The Landing, where Jonathan has his beach house, and he's about to find out how much love matters.' (Source: Publisher's website)

2016 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards The Courier-Mail People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year
Last amended 16 Nov 2021 13:52:10
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