Malla Nunn

Malla Nunn (born 1963) is a Swaziland-born Australian screenwriter, film director and author. Her works include the murder mysteries A Beautiful Place to Die and Let the Dead Lie, as well as the award-winning young adult novel, When the Ground Is Hard.

Private life Nunn was born in Swaziland in 1963 and moved to Perth with her parents in the 1970s. She attended the University of Western Australia graduating with a B.A. with a double major in English and History. She completed a M.A. in Theatre Studies at Villanova University in Philadelphia. While in America she met her husband-to-be and they live with their two children in Sydney.

Career Nunn wrote and directed several short films including the documentary Servant of the Ancestors in 1998 which screened at several festivals. It won Best Documentary Silver Images, Pan African, Zanzibar Film Festival, 2000. Her first book A Beautiful Place to Die was published in 2008. It is the first instalment in the Emmanuel Cooper series of novels, set in South Africa in the beginning of the apartheid era.