Sara Douglass biography

Sara Douglass grew up in South Australia. After working as a nurse she completed three degrees at the University of Adelaide including a PhD in early modern English history. She worked as a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at La Trobe University Bendigo. Sara now lives in Tasmania and is a full-time writer and gardener.

"Sara Douglass not my birth name - I'm actually Sara Warneke, but if I'd been a boy I would have been called Douglass ... so when my first publisher HarperCollins Australia insisted I choose a different surname to get me off the lowest shelves in bookshops, I went with 'Douglass' with the double 'ss' to feminize it. I was born in 1957 in Penola, a small town in the south-east of South Australia. My parents, two older sisters and older brother lived on a farm called Gundealga (look out for the name in the Axis books) where Dad and Mum farmed sheep and a lot of hope. I loved the farm, and hated leaving it to go to school and, eventually, to move to the capital city of South Australia, Adelaide, when I was about seven. We moved to Fisher Street in Malvern, a southern suburb, living in an old and gently decaying bluestone Victorian house (which I still dream of regularly ... it was the house where I did most of my growing up). I was packed off to school, Methodist Ladies College, which was gentle, gentile and caring, and totally oblivious to the social revolutions of the 'sixties'."

All Sara Douglass Reviews