ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Graeme Sparkes was born in Launceston, Tasmania, in 1951.

With his father suffering a mental illness, the first five years of Graeme’s life were unsettled, shifting from house to house, location to location, including a short time in Portland, Victoria, and on Flinders Island in Bass Strait.

After a couple of years travelling along the eastern seaboard of Australia, while his father sold rotary clothes lines, the family settled in Portland, where Graeme lived until he completed high school.
He studied sociology and history at La Trobe University in Melbourne, taught in the secondary education system for four years, and then spent a decade as an itinerant labourer and taxi driver, before returning to teaching.

In the late eighties he travelled extensively abroad and wrote Beyond Tijuana about his journey through Latin America in 1992, the quincentenary of Columbus’ voyages to the ‘New World’.

After travelling around Australia and writing The Red Island, he spent many years teaching English to young adult refugees and migrants at a TAFE college in Melbourne and to university students in China. In 2017 he retired.

These days he spends much of his time writing fiction.