ANNA MARIA DELL'OSO
Anna Maria Dell'oso is one of Australia's most well-known writers and journalists. Her writing – whether journalism, literary essay or fiction – has a voice that attracts a wide and devoted readership.

Anna was born in Melbourne and studied music and humanities at the University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts. Her career began with a cadetship on the Christchurch Star in New Zealand and developed on the Sydney Morning Herald, where she worked as a feature writer and columnist. Anna's distinctive style made her a well-known by-line throughout the 80s and 90s on newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Financial Review, The National Times and The Times on Sunday. She also freelanced as a Film Critic and Arts writer on magazines such as HQ, Harpers Bazaar, Good Taste and wrote regular columns for New Woman and The Open Road (NRMA). But it was from her weekly column in the Good Weekend magazine that Anna became well-known. A collection of her writings from the Good Weekend - Cats Cradles and Chamomile Tea - continues to be studied by high school students and creative writing students throughout Australia.

Anna has also published extensively as a writer and dramatist. Her book of fiction, Songs of the Suitcase (HarperCollins) won the 1999 Steele Rudd Award. Anna is a graduate of the Playwriting Studio at NIDA and has written successfully for theatre and opera, having a play Tinsel and Ashes, performed at Carivale, and an opera, Bride of Fortune, performed at the Perth Festival.

In recent years Anna has become a passionate and devoted teacher of creative writing and journalism. Using a visual style of presentation, Anna lectures extensively on de-mystifying the process of creative writing, focusing particularly on understanding dramatic structure, developing story-telling skills, the relationship between character and plot and on journaling techniques that help scaffolding creative writing. She also lectures on film, journalism and HSC related topics. Wrestling with the Invisible, Anna's inspirational and insightful seminar for HSC English Extension 2 students, has been highly popular in schools as it reveals a writer's process in the creation and organization of a major literary work. With practical experience of both fiction and non-fiction genres, Anna has run a wide variety of workshops and seminars on creative writing and is a popular choice as writer-in-residence, with return invitations from the many schools, universities, community groups and writers' centres she has visited throughout NSW and interstate.

Anna now writes and teaches full-time, living in the inner-west of Sydney with her musician husband and their three children. She is currently working on a novel, Beating Time, about four struggling musicians from contrasting musical worlds. Her latest commission is with composer Paul Jarman and the Sydney Children's Choir, creating a choral work about heritage.

“Songs of the Suitcase ... is a magnificent book. Its author, Anna Maria Dell'oso, has the gift of making readers feel as though they are actually inside her work, living among its characters. Surfacing from one of her stories and its swirl of aunts, grandmothers and babies, its undercurrent of music and long-nourished rage, you feel slightly dazed, snatched from one reality to another ...
Dell'oso's remarkable skill, her warmth, and the depth of her observations have such a powerful effect that one almost forgets to notice the language, the beautiful ease she has with words ... Songs of the Suitcase feels like the result of years of living, the distilled thoughts of half a lifetime's experience.
It's a book to be thankful for.”
- Tegan Bennett, Sydney Morning Herald

"... sublime short stories and a novella … Dell'oso is proficient at blending poignancy with humour ... Succinct lyricism sits alongside the language of the streets ... If you enjoy writing that covers great distances with absolute economy, you will enjoy this. It adheres closely to Borges's dictum that ‘the writer's job is to outline the steps, it is the people who should dance‘...”
- Raimondo Cortese, The Australian's Review of Books

"... Anna Maria Dell'oso strikes me as a female Robert Dessaix. It's more to do with the intensity of Dell'oso's vision, the quality of her prose and the strong impression of personal involvement in her stories ... A sense of the earth, of family and continuity is strong in these stories, spread although they are across a geography as wide as the world ... There is music everywhere in the prose of these pieces, a passionate poetry of observation and expression ... This is an involving, rewarding collection, at once emotionally draining and emotionally sustaining the reader ...”
- Katherine England, The Adelaide Advertiser

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