Sophie Cunningham – March 6 2016

Sophie was publisher at McPhee Gribble/Penguin for two years and Trade Publisher at Allen & Unwin for ten years, where she was known for commissioning and editing innovative fiction and non-fiction. She is a former editor of Meanjin and was until recently the chair of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. In addition to her two novels, Sophie has written the non-fiction Melbourne and Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy which uniquely shares portrayals of an Indigenous experience of Cyclone Tracy, a side of the story not often included in official accounts of the 1974 natural disaster.

Geography
Text Publishing Company, 2004; ISBN 9781921351709

When Catherine is working abroad, she meets Michael in Los Angeles. Their time together is brief but intensely passionate. Catherine is seduced into thinking of this casual fling and its aftermath -based on a series of postcards, faxes and e-mails – as a relationship. She says it’s not just sex. But her friends say it’s not love. Many years later, on a beach in Sri Lanka, Catherine and her new friend Ruby get to talking about him. ‘Tell me,’ Ruby says. ‘I like stories.’ Finally Catherine reveals all about the one who drove her crazy.

Bird
Text Publishing Company, 2008; ISBN 9781921351525

Based on a true story, this is an exquisite depiction of the equivocal bond between mother and daughter against the traumas and social upheavals of the mid-twentieth century. To her lovers and friends, Anna Davidoff was a mystery. Her daughter, Ana-Sofia, knows the stories of how the young post-war refugee from a devastated Soviet Union became a Hollywood starlet, a muse to jazz greats, a friend of the Beats – and along the way a heroin addict. How later, ordained as a Buddhist nun, she died alone in a Himalayan cave at the age of forty-three. But now Ana-Sofia is the same age Anna was when she died and Anna has begun to haunt her.