Bio
Amy Barker was born in 1978 at Southport, Queensland. She had a nomadic childhood, changing schools often. The majority of her early years were spent on Queensland’s Gold Coast and also the Tasman Peninsula where her father’s family are fifth generation Tasmanians.
The recipient of a prestigious T.J. Ryan Memorial Scholarship, Amy attended the University of Queensland to study Arts/Law. After obtaining her Arts degree in English Literature she abandoned law a year from graduation in order to pursue her writing.
In 2004 Amy graduated with distinction from a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Queensland University of Technology and in 2005 won a Varuna Award for Manuscript Development.
To support her fiction writing Amy worked part-time in law research and led the Remix My Lit project within the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. She was also editor of the resulting University of Sydney Press publication, Through the Clockâs Workings, the world’s first remixed and remixable short story anthology.
In 2008 Amy was resident at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for professional artists at Annaghmakerrig in Ireland and the same year won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Best Emerging Author for her debut novel Omega Park, which was published by University of Queensland Press in August 2009. Omega Park was Highly Commended in the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction in 2010 and became a ‘challenged book’ when it crossed over from the Adult to Young Adult market due to its realistic and confronting portrayal of life on an isolated public housing estate.
With the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, Amy is now working full-time on her second novel, Paradise Earth, set on the Tasman Peninsula and inspired by the loss of a childhood friend in the Port Arthur massacre.
Amy lives in Melbourne.
She can be contacted at amy[AT]amybarkeronline.com
