Graeme Sparkes is the author of three memoirs: Beyond Tijuana and The Red Island, both travel narratives, and You Never Met My Father, which is an account of growing up with a parent who had a lifelong mentally illness. In 2019 his first novel, Macaulay Station, was published. His second novel, Smothered, is now available in bookshops and online, and also as an ebook.

In 2018 Sparkes was awarded the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Jim Hamilton prize for an unpublished manuscript, for his novel, Death of An Author, and he has other novels awaiting publication.

His short story, Out of My Depth, was short-listed for the Alan Marshall prize in 2016.

He has had articles and short stories published in literary magazines and newspapers over a long period. He has also been interviewed for most of his books on ABC radio and other stations, and a guest at two writers’ festivals: the Williamstown Literary Festival and Ex Libris Port Fairy Festival of Words.

Most mornings, as early as six, you will find him writing in a timber hut in his back yard. He admits it is an obsession.

Smothered

When Alan’s mother rings to beg him to return to the family home for the final weeks of his father’s life, he baulks, unwilling to be around the man who tried to control every moment of his childhood and adolescence. But he is at the dying man’s bedside when his father makes an extraordinary request. Alan is tempted but does he follow through?

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