This biographical article is written like a résumé .(September 2017) |
Elizabeth Ann Byrski AM (born 1944 in London) is an Australian writer and journalist.
After graduating from Notre Dame Convent in Lingfield, Surrey, in 1960, Byrski furthered her education at the Crawley College of Further Education (1960–61) and the Wall Hall College of Education (1973–74). Her first job was as a secretary at a pest control firm in Sussex. Her journalism career began when she started as a journalist in 1962 on the Horley Advertiser (part of Surrey Mirror Newspapers), in Horley, Surrey. She moved to Australia in 1981. [1] [2]
Byrski was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2023 Australia Day Honours. [3]
As a freelance journalist Byrski's work has appeared in the Australian Financial Review, The West Australian, The Australian, The Age, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and The Dominion (Wellington, NZ), Homes and Living, New Idea, Cosmopolitan, SkyWest In-Flight, Building Magazine, and Portfolio.
In 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996 she was a broadcaster and executive producer at ABC 720 6WF in Perth. [4] This period included co-presenting the Grapevine program with then-television newsreader Peter Holland. She was also an occasional book reviewer for the ABC.
In 1987 she was a panelist on the daily Channel 7 program Beauty and the Beast .
She has won several awards for her journalism, including the Radio Prize at the 1996 WA Media Awards and the CSIRO WA Award for Excellence in Science Journalism.
From 1983 to 1989 she wrote the weekly Viewpoint column in Perth's Community Newspapers group.
She has been an occasional guest presenter for the School of Isolated and Distance Education TV program Our Side Your Side.
She has also been a policy advisor to the Government of Western Australia and is a past-President of the WA Women's Advisory Council to the Premier. Her past honorary positions include board memberships with the WA Alzheimer's Association and the Family Planning Association of WA.
Gang of Four was published in France in 2007 as La bande des quarters by Les Presses de la Cite, and in Germany by Mohrbooks in 2008. Food, Sex & Money was published in France by Presses de la Cite in 2009 and in Germany in 2010. [5]
Byrski is an Associate Professor and the Director of the China Australia Writing Centre at Curtin University. [5]
From 1996 to 2003 she was an Adjunct Teaching Fellow at Curtin, teaching Professional Writing, Journalism and Media Ethics.
From 1984 to 1988 she was a sessional tutor in print journalism at the-then Western Australia Institute of Technology (now called Curtin University of Technology).
Byrski is a member of the Australian Journalists Association section of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance; and the Australian Society of Authors.
Carmen Mary Lawrence is an Australian academic and former politician who was the Premier of Western Australia from 1990 to 1993, the first woman to become the premier of an Australian state. A member of the Labor Party, she later entered federal politics as a member of the House of Representatives from 1994 to 2007, and served as a minister in the Keating government.
Dorothy Coade Hewett was an Australian playwright, poet and author, and a romantic feminist icon. In writing and in her life, Hewett was an experimenter. As her circumstances and beliefs changed, she progressed through different literary styles: modernism, socialist realism, expressionism and avant garde. She was a member of the Australian Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, which informed her work during that period.
Robert Duffield was a journalist who served as foreign editor of The Australian from 1968 until 1974. His single most memorable work was Rogue Bull, a 1979 biography of Lang Hancock. Duffield won the Clarion Prize at the 1988 WA Media Awards. He spent his last years as a lecturer at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, now Curtin University. He inspired a whole generation of journalists from the first journalism school in WA. Those students have fanned out around the world with many still active in journalism. He died in August 2000. This was followed by a wake in Surry Hills Sydney where his Australian Newspaper colleagues toasted him and his career. Robert Duffield was the leader of the infamous walk out of journalists at the Australian over the editorial treatment of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.
Simon Brown, is an Australian science fiction writer.
John Curtin College of the Arts, originally John Curtin High School, is an independent, public co-educational, partially selective high school, located in East Street, Fremantle, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia.
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Peter Holland is a senior lecturer in the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth, Western Australia.
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May Lorna O'Brien BEM was an Australian educator and author.
Melissa Parke is a former Australian Labor Party politician and UN human rights lawyer, who served as Member for the federal electoral Division of Fremantle in the Australian House of Representatives from 2007 to 2016. In 2013 Parke was appointed by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as Minister for International Development and served in that capacity until Labor lost government later that year.
The Barbara Jefferis Award is an Australian literary award prize. The award was created in 2007 after being endowed by John Hinde upon his death to commemorate his late wife, author Barbara Jefferis. It is funded by his $1 million bequest. Originally an annual award, it has been awarded biennially since 2012.
Tracy Ryan is an Australian poet and novelist. She has also worked as an editor, publisher, translator, and academic.
Catherine Helen King was an ABC broadcaster and community worker in Western Australia. She was the daughter of prominent Australian academic and essayist Sir Walter Murdoch.
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Marie Joan Winch was an Indigenous Australian nurse and educator.
Dorothy Lucie Sanders, better known under the pseudonym Lucy Walker, was a prolific and successful Australian romance novelist.
Lyndall Hadow (1903–1976) was a Western Australian short story writer and journalist. The Lyndall Hadow Annual Award for Short Stories was created by the Fellowship of Australian Writers Western Australia (FAWWA) in 1977 to honour her.