AustLit

Charles Massy has been a farmer on the Monaro in southern New South Wales. His non-fiction work Breaking the Sheep's Back : The Shocking True Story of the Decline and Fall of the Australian Wool Industry (2011) was shortlisted in the 2011 Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature and for the History Award in the 2012 Prime Minister's Literary Awards. In 2017, he published Call of the Reed Warbler, which was longlisted for the Indie Book Awards (Nonfiction); shortlisted for the ABIA Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year, The Nib Literary Award, the Queensland Literary Awards Non-Fiction Book Award, and the Adelaide Festival Non-fiction Award; and won the Tertairy and TAFe section of the Educational Publishing Awards. A revised and updated edition was released by UQP in 2020.

Massy completed a BSc (Zoology, Human Ecology) from the Australian National University (ANU) before farming for forty years: he later returned to ANU to complete a PhD in Human Ecology.