Delia Falconer is the award-winning author of four books, The Service of Clouds, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, Sydney and Signs and Wonders. Between them, these books have been shortlisted for national awards across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, innovation, history, and biography, including the Miles Franklin, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the National Biography Awards. 

Delia burst onto the literary scene by winning both the HQ/Joop! short story competition and the Island Magazine essay competition, for her essay “Columbus’s Blindness,” in the same year. Since then, Delia’s short stories and essays have been widely awarded and anthologised, including in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, The Penguin Best Australian Short Stories and various editions of The Best Australian Essays and The Best Australian Stories.

Her criticism has appeared regularly in The Sydney Review of Books, The Australian, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald, and is frequently linked by international online digests such as 3 Quarks Daily, Arts and Letters Daily, and Bookforum.com.

In 2018 she was winner of the Walkley-Pascall Award for Arts Criticism for her essay “The Opposite of Glamour”. This marked a turn in her work towards writing about the profound challenges we are all facing—human and non-human alike—in a present of accelerating global change.

Delia holds a Doctorate in English Literature and Cultural Studies and has taught for many years, including at the University of Melbourne, RMIT, and the Cátedra Coetzee: Literaturas del Sur at the University of San Martín in Buenos Aires. She has served as a judge for numerous national awards including the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Stella Prize, and Age Book of the Year, acted as a peer for the Australia Council and Copyright Agency, mentored for the Australian Society of Authors and Westwords, and served on the board of Varuna: the Writers’ House. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney.