Biography

One of the stars of Australian fiction, Monica McInerney is the Australian-born Dublin-based author of the best-selling novels The Godmothers, The Trip of a Lifetime, Hello from the Gillespies, The House of Memories, Lola’s Secret, At Home with the Templetons, Those Faraday Girls (The Faraday Girls in the USA), Family Baggage, The Alphabet Sisters, Spin the Bottle (Greetings from Somewhere Else in the USA), Upside Down Inside Out, A Taste for It, and a short story collection All Together Now including the novella Odd One Out – published internationally and in translation in more than 12 languages. Her articles and short stories have appeared in newspapers, magazines and anthologies in Australia, the UK and Ireland. Her first children’s book, Marcie Gill and the Caravan Park Cat, was published in Australia by Puffin Books in November 2021.

The Godmothers was an instant Top 10 bestseller in Australia in October 2020, was shortlisted for the General Fiction Book of the Year in the 2021 Australian Book Industry Awards and voted into the Top 5 of Better Reading’s Top 100 best loved books in Australia for 2022. It spent 10 consecutive weeks in the Irish Times Top 10 bestseller list in Ireland in 2021. The Trip of a Lifetime went straight to Number 1 in Australia in July 2017 and was a Top 10 bestseller in Ireland. It was shortlisted for the General Fiction Book of the Year in the 2018 Australian Book Industry Awards. Hello from the Gillespies was a Number 1 Australian bestseller and spent five weeks in the Irish Top 10 bestseller lists. The House of Memories was a Number 1 Australian bestseller and was shortlisted for the 2013 Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) Awards in the UK in the Contemporary Romantic Novel category. Lola’s Secret was shortlisted for the General Fiction Book of the Year in the 2012 Australian Book Industry Awards. At Home with the Templetons was a Number 1 bestseller in Australia and was shortlisted for the General Fiction Book of the Year in the 2011 Australian Book Industry Awards and for the Eason Popular Fiction Award in the 2010 Irish Book Awards. Those Faraday Girls won the General Fiction Book of the Year in the 2008 Australian Book Industry Awards. All Together Now was shortlisted in the same category in the 2009 Australian Book Industry Awards.

In 2006, Monica was the main ambassador for the Australian Government’s Books Alive national reading campaign, for which she wrote a limited edition novella called Odd One Out.

In 2019, 2018, 2016 & 2014, Monica was voted in to the Top 10 of Booktopia’s Australia’s Favourite Authors poll.

Monica, 57, grew up in a family of seven children in the Clare Valley wine region of South Australia, where her father was the railway stationmaster and her mother worked in the local library. Since then Monica has lived all around Australia (in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart) in Ireland (in County Meath and Dublin) and in London, and has also travelled widely.

She was a book publicist for ten years, working in Ireland and Australia and promoting authors such as Roald Dahl, Tim Winton, Edna O’Brien and Max Fatchen and events such as the Dublin International Writers’ Festival.

She has also worked as an event manager and organiser of tourism festivals in the Clare Valley; as a freelance writer/editor and in arts marketing in South Australia; a public relations consultant in Tasmania; a record company press officer in Sydney; a barmaid in an Irish music pub in London and as a temp, grapepicker, hotel cleaner, kindergym instructor and waitress. Her first job out of school as a 17-year-old was as wardrobe girl (and later scriptwriter) for the children’s TV show Here’s Humphrey at Channel 9 in Adelaide. She is now a full-time writer.

For more than 25 years, she and her Irish husband have been moving back and forth between Australia and Ireland. They currently live in Dublin.