Isobelle Carmody biography

Isobelle Carmody was born June 16, 1958 in Wangaratta, Victoria, Australia. She is an author of science fiction and fantasy for children, young-adults and adults and best known for her Obernewtyn Chronicles, which she wrote while she was still at high school and worked on it while completing her Bachelor of Arts and subsequent journalism cadetship.

Carmody is the author of many award-winning short stories, Scatterlings won Talking Book of the Year in 1992 and in 1993 The Gathering was a joint winner of 1993 CBC Book of the Year Award and winner of the 1994 Children’s Literature Peace Prize. Billy Thunder and the Night Gate was shortlisted for the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's' Literature in the 2001 NSW Premiers Literary Awards. Greylands was named a White Raven at Bologna Book Fair and the title story of the Green Monkey Dream collection won best short story in the Aurealis Awards. Darksong won an Aurealis Award in its year. Alyzon Whitestarr won a Golden Aurealis. The Red Wind, the first book in The Kingdom of The Lost series which she also illustrated won the CBC Book of the Year in 2011 in the Younger Readers’ Category.

Carmody was Guest of Honour at the 2007 Australian National Science Fiction Convention, Convergence 2, held in Melbourne.

“It was lovely building their relationship. I really do like a thread of human relationship, a very intense, passionate, loving relationship. It was very important for me, because she started out like I started out; feeling utterly unlovable, prickly and difficult to love, as well as feeling that she would never be loved. I think she was difficult to be loved. And as she grew and grew in confidence, she learns more and more about love. The relationships between people should grow with the people. And sometimes, as with Kella and Domick, they grow apart. And that’s life too. And other times, there’s a ghosting of things that happen. Selmar is a ghost of Elspeth in a way; she is an echo of what she might have become. And all the way through there are these kind of echoes, where a theme is struck which is 'if it could go that way, this might happen.' Domick is also another ghost, a ghost of Rushton himself."
Isobelle Carmody talking to our own Joshua S Hill regarding the Obernewtyn Chronicles and its lead Elspeth and her love interest, Rushton.

"Blends graceful storytelling with appealing characters." Library Journal

June 18th 2009 interview with Isobelle Carmody

By Joshua S HillA few weeks ago I had the opportunity to sit down with one of Australia’s most beloved authors. Isobelle Carmody is author of the critically acclaimed Obernewtyn series, as well as a veritable cornucopia [...]

Read interview

All Isobelle Carmody Reviews