Ursula Dubosarsky

'When Ursula Dubosarsky writes, the ordinary becomes fascinating: every small and unremarkable thing is imbued with the sweetest, softest charm. Reading her novels is like walking through a dream: you know you're not allowed to stay, but you don't want to leave it, and when it's gone, you can't stop thinking about it. ' Sonya Hartnett

 Ursula Dubosarsky was born in Sydney, Australia in 1961, the third child in a family of writers. From the time she was first able to read, at age six, she wanted to be a writer. She wrote stories and poems and puppet plays all through primary and high school.

After finishing school, Ursula went to Sydney University to study English and languages, including Old Icelandic, Latin and Greek. When she graduated, she moved to Canberra to work in the public service, and in the evenings after work she wrote a time slip adventure called "Zizzy Zing".

She then spent a year traveling, meeting her Argentinean husband, Avi, while working on a kibbutz in Israel. They married in London, then returned to Australia to live, where their daughter Maisie was born.She wrote a comic children's novel, "High Hopes", which she sent as an unsolicited manuscript to Jane Godwin at Penguin Books in Melbourne. The book was accepted.

Since this time, Ursula has published many more novels as well as a number of books for younger children, and has won several prestigious national literary prizes. From 2004 she worked for a number of years as an editor on the NSW School Magazine, a long-running literary magazine for school children. She lives in Sydney with her family - Avi, daughter Maisie, and two sons, Dover and Bruno.

She has completed a PhD in English literature at Macquarie University, concentrating on the work of Rumer Godden and Mary Norton – click here for further information and here for details re access to her thesis.