About Lorraine Marwood

Lorraine was born in a regional town in Northern Victoria.  There were paddocks and bush to roam and explore and dream.  She had a dog and cats.  She loved playing games with her sisters.

Books she read which particularly shaped her writing are:

• George MacDonald's 'The Princess and Curdie' ( which she still has)

• Fairy Tales

• Leon Garfield

• Sharon Creech

• Elizabeth Goudge

Some books she has been reading lately are:  'The Hunger Games' and Meg Rosoff's books.

How did you become an author?

That's a good question.  "I've always wanted to be a writer ', says Lorraine, 'ever since I was in grade five.  It was essentially me, a craving, a need.  Yet funny thing was that I was not very good at school, I mean I wasn't a bright student.  I was a dreamer.  And a writer needs to be a dreamer.  Later when I was a high school I was a good student.  That was different.  The high school actually had a library- I'd read a book a night.'

But getting back to the question... "I wrote in note books, I read all there was about becoming a writer and I read, read.  But I never told anyone other than my family that I wanted to be a writer.  Meanwhile I trained as a teacher and when I earned my first money as a trainee teacher, I bought a portable typewriter- yes this was the days before the advent of the computer.  How I loved typing up my hand written poems- they seemed so much more publishable typed up.  One of my first poems was published when I was about 18 years old in a hippy- type magazine called 'The Mundane Egg.

From then on I wrote when ever I could keeping note books with snatches of ideas and thoughts.'

What do you need to do or learn to become an author?

• Write- use a note book to write little ideas, things you might see in a day- or a snatch of conversation. Put a date down. Often I trawl my older note books for the beginning line of a poem or a happening for a story.

• Read as much as you can. Read about authors, how they began – they will always have served and apprenticeship in writing, writing, rejection, publication, writing.

What works have you had published?

I began the road to publication through poetry. Over the years I've had many poems in journals bot in Australia and overseas. I've also done some editing for a small literary journal called 'Tears in the Fence'. It really helps one's own writing to see how other people submit work to editors also.

Then I began to write stories for children and poetry for children. School Magazine NSW began to accept my work. Over the years I've had about 40 poems published in these magazines. I love the artwork commissioned to accompany the poems too.

Then I gathered enough poems for a collection and Ron Pretty of Five Islands Press published my first collection 'Redback Mansion.'