Meg McKinlay

Meg McKinlay is a Western Australian writer. She has written a number of books for children and young adults, including How to Make a Bird and A Single Stone. She has won two Prime Minister's Literary Awards and three Crystal Kite Awards.

Biography Born Megan McKinlay, she spent her childhood in Bendigo, Victoria. During high school she was an exchange student in Japan. She graduated with a PhD from the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 2001 for her thesis "Gender and cross-cultural analysis: The novels of Tsushima Yûko 1976–1985". She subsequently lectured at UWA in Australian literature, Japanese and creative writing and, was an honorary research associate of that university.

In 2010 she won a residency in Japan and in 2020 she won a May Gibbs Children's Literature Trust Fellowship.

McKinlay currently lives in Fremantle, Western Australia.

Awards

Surface Tension 2012 Davitt Award, Best Young Adult Novel winner Ten Tiny Things 2013 Crystal Kite Award, New Zealand/Australia regional winner A Single Stone 2015 Aurealis Award for best children's fiction winner 2015 Queensland Literary Awards, Children's Book Award winner 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Awards,Young Adult Fiction winner Catch a Falling Star 2019 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, winner Prize for Writing for Children 2020 Crystal Kite Award New Zealand/Australia regional winner How to Make a Bird 2020 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, winner Prize for Writing for Children 2021Prime Minister's Literary Awards, Children's Fiction winner 2021 Crystal Kite Award, New Zealand/Australia regional winner

Selected works

The Truth about Penguins, co-authored with Mark Jackson, 2010 Surface Tension, 2011 Ten Tiny Things, illustrated by Kyle Hughes-Odgers, 2012 A Single Stone, 2015 Duck!, illustrated by Nathaniel Eckstrom, 2018 Catch a Falling Star, 2019 How to Make a Bird, illustrated by Matt Ottley, 2020 Bella and the Voyaging House, illustrated by Nicholas Schafer, 2021