Paddy O’Reilly’s latest novel is Other Houses, published by Affirm Press and shortlisted in the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Her most recent short story collection Peripheral Vision, was published by UQP in 2015. It was described in Books and Publishing as ‘the work of an author at the top of her form’ and in The Australian as a collection by ‘one of Australia’s most accomplished authors of the long-wave story’.
Her novel The Wonders was published in Augus
t 2014 in Australia by Affirm Press and February 2015 in the USA by Simon and Schuster. Winner of the Norma K Hemming award and nominated for the Kirkus Prize.
The Fine Colour of Rust (HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster) was released in 2012 in Australia, the UK and the USA. Shortlisted for the ASAL Gold Medal.
Paddy’s first short story collection, The End of the World (UQP) was published to critical acclaim in April, 2007. The stories in the collection had won a number of national and international story awards. The End of the World was chosen as one of the year’s best books in various publications from Australian Book Review to The Financial Review. Shortlisted in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Her debut novel, The Factory, was also in the best books of the year lists in Australian Book Review and the Sydney Morning Herald and was Highly Commended in the FAW Christina Stead Award for Fiction. Broadcast in fifteen episodes as the ABC Radio National Book Reading.
The novella ‘Deep Water’ was published in 2007 as one of four in the novella anthology, Love and Desire, edited by Cate Kennedy.
She has also written screenplays and worked as additional screenwriter for films which have been nominated for AFI awards and screened nationally and internationally.
Paddy has been Asialink writer-in-residence in Japan, a fellow at Varuna: the Writers’ House, writer-in-residence at Kelly Steps Cottage Tasmania, The Lockup Newcastle, Bundanon Trust, and the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Perth. She has also been presenter and reader at the International Conference on the Short Story in Toronto and Arkansas, and a full fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, USA.
Paddy spent several years working as a copywriter and translator in Japan. She now lives in Melbourne, Australia.