Danielle Wood – August 1 2021

Cape Bruny Lighthouse – decommissioned August 6 1996

Longest continuously manned lighthouse in Australia (158 years) – first lit March 1838.

Danielle has worked as a journalist, radio producer and media officer for Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of Tasmania, a PhD from Edith Cowan University and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Tasmania. Her awards include the Australian/Vogel Literary Award and Dobbie Literary Award and she was named Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelist in 2004 and 2007. Danielle’s other books include Rosie’s Little Cautionary Tales for Girls and the non-fiction titles Housewife Superstar: The Very Best of Marjorie Bligh and Marjorie Bligh’s HOME: Hints on Managing Everything, honouring Mrs Marjorie Bligh – 95 years old, three husbands and reputedly the real-life inspiration for Dame Edna Everage. Under the nom de plume Minnie Darke, Danielle has written Star-crossed and The Lost Love Song and together with Ralph Crane she has co-edited the collections Deep South: Stories from Tasmania and Island Story: Tasmania in Object and Text. Her other nom de plume is Angelica Banks under which she writes children’s books with Heather Rose.

Alphabet of Light and Dark
Allen & Unwin, 2003; ISBN 9781741140651
After her grandfather’s death, Essie returns to Bruny Island, Tasmania, to the lighthouse where her great-great-grandfather kept watch for nearly 40 years, and begins to write the stories of her ancestors. A tiny coin found inside a Cloudy Bay oyster, a postcard of a white-haired child leaning against a beached dinghy and a coconut peeled and carved once upon a time on the Batavian coast. These trinkets, found in a sea chest, and the fragmented memories of her grandfather’s tall tales are all Essie has left of her family history. Melding personal, family and colonial history, Wood’s evocative and lyrical prose explores the past and place, searching and belonging, love, loss and grief.

Mothers Grimm
Allen & Unwin, 2014; ISBN 9781741756746
In a fairytale, the only good mother is six feet under. All the others are bad news. A fairytale mother will exchange her first-born child for a handful of leafy greens. And if times get tough, she’ll walk her babes into the woods and leave them there. But mothers of today do no such things. Do they? In this collection of heart-breakingly honest stories, the mothers of the Brothers Grimm are brought – with wit, subversiveness and lyrical prose – into the here and now. Danielle Wood turns four fairytales on their heads and makes them exquisitely her own. A sly, cheeky and blackly comic novel about mothering, heartache, heartbreak, desire, love and death.