Sophie Cunningham
Sophie Cunningham started her publishing career as an editor at McPhee Gribble and publisher there in 1992. In 1994 she became Trade Publisher at Allen & Unwin before moving to part time work in 1999 to write her first novel Geography. Authors she has edited and/or published include Richard Flanagan, Tim Winton, Luke Davies and Kaz Cooke.
Sophie has also worked as a journalist. Her work has been published in a range of papers and magazines including The Melbourne Times, Cinema Papers, New Society, New Editions, Vogue, The Eye, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend and the Age. She has taught editing at Melbourne University and at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Sophie was recently appointed as the new editor of Meanjin, Australia’s longest-running literary journal.
Geography was published in 2004. Sophie’s second novel, Bird, was published in 2008. Her latest book, published by UNSW Press, is Melbourne.
Website: http://www.sophiecunningham.com
Books by Sophie Cunningham
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Geography
For Catherine travel is about many things other than getting from here to there. It is about loss and longing, and the possibility of escape.
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Bird
To her lovers and friends, Anna Davidoff was a mystery. Beautiful, charismatic, irresponsible yet disarming; famous, in a way, but ultimately unknowable.
To her daughter, she is no less an enigma even now, thirty years after her death. Of course Ana-Sofia knows the stories of Anna’s unlikely transformations. 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. The stories, too, are famous.
But now Ana-Sofia is the same age Anna was when she died. Successful, content, single in New York City and hopeful of new love. And Anna has begun to haunt her.
Sophie Cunningham’s spellbinding new novel is an exquisite depiction of the equivocal bond between mother and daughter, and the search for identity through Buddhism.
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Melbourne
Sophie Cunningham writes a year in the city’s life, a year that takes us from the heatwave that culminated on Black Saturday when temperatures soared to 47 degrees to the destructive deluge of a hailstorm.
She walks through Melbourne’s oldest suburb to its largest market, she goes to the footy and to the comedy festival, she talks publishing and learns how to use a letterpress. Along the way she journeys deep into her own recollections of the city she grew up in, and tells stories from its history: the theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman, the Hoddle Street massacre, William Barak’s trek from Healesville, the Westgate Bridge Disaster, the high drama of the 1970 and 2009 AFL grand finals and the Market Murders of the sixties.
She strolls by Melbourne’s rivers and creeks while considering the history of the wetlands and river that sit at Melbourne’s heart. She clambers through the drains that lie beneath. For it is water – the corralling of it, the excess of it, the squandering of it, the lack of it – that defi nes Melbourne’s history, its present and its future.
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