Gail Jones

Gail Jones is an Australian novelist and academic.

Early life and career Gail Jones was born in Harvey, Western Australia. She grew up in Broome and Kalgoorlie. She studied fine arts briefly at the University of Melbourne before returning to Western Australia where she took her undergraduate degree and PhD from the University of Western Australia in 1994. Her thesis was titled Mimesis and alterity: postcolonialism, ethnography and the representation of racial 'others'. She is currently Professor of Writing in the Writing and Society Research School at the Western Sydney University.

Jones has also contributed content for an art exhibition, The floating world by Jo Darbyshire (2009).

Since 2017 Jones has been involved in a research project Other Worlds: Forms of 'World Literature', for which she is leading a theme titled 'Form as Encounter' that is exploring intercultural intersections and encounters.

Personal life Jones has a daughter, Kyra Giorgi, who is also a writer.

Awards Jones was presented with the Lifetime Achievement in Literature Award by Creative Australia in 2024.

The House of Breathing T. A.G. Hungerford Award for an unpublished work of Fiction by a Western Australian Writer, 1991 Barbara Ramsden Award Book of the Year, 1992 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards Steele Rudd Award, 1993

Fetish Lives Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Fiction joint-winner and Premier's Prize joint-winner 1997 Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, 2019 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, Fiction winner, 2019 Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction, 2019 Shortlisted for the Voss Literary Prize, 2019 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, 2020, Fiction Award Our Shadows

Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, 2021 Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction, 2021 Shortlisted for the Voss Literary Prize, 2021 Salonika Burning

ARA Historical Novel Prize for Adult, winner, 2023 Shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award, 2024 One Another Shortlisted for Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, NSW Premier's Literary Awards, 2025 Shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award, 2025 Longlisted for Voss Literary Prize, 2025

Published works Novels Black Mirror (2002) Sixty Lights (2004) Dreams of Speaking (2006) Sorry (2007) Five Bells (2011) A Guide to Berlin (2015) Salonika Burning (2022) One Another (2024) The Name of the Sister (2025)

Short story collections The House of Breathing (1992) Fetish Lives (1997)

Critical works Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture Gail Jones, 'A Dreaming, a Sauntering: re-imagining critical paradigms' JASAL 5 (2006) The Piano (Australian Screen Classics), Currency Press (2007)

These works have been widely translated. The languages include Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Mandarin, Polish, Croatian and Czech.