Debra Adelaide, Fiction Editor

Debra Adelaide’s literary career commenced in the late 1980s, and since then she has been a freelance writer, book reviewer, editor, researcher, and finally an academic. She studied at the University of Sydney, where she also worked as a tutor in the English department in the early 1980s and completed a doctorate in Australian literature in 1990. Her latest books are Zebra and The Innocent Reader, both published by Picador.

Her first novel, The Hotel Albatross, was published in 1995. Prior to that she was the author of Australian Women Writers, a bibliographic guide, and editor of the collection A Bright and Fiery Troop (1988), which was part of Penguin’s ground-breaking Australian Women’s Library series, edited by Dale Spender, which reintroduced the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers to contemporary readers. She also researched the life and writing of Dymphna Cusack, and rediscovered, edited and published Cusack’s previously unpublished memoir, A Window in the Dark (1991) as part of a National Library of Australia series based on its manuscript collections.