Melissa Ashley

Melissa Ashley (born 1973) is an Australian novelist. At the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards, her novel The Birdman's Wife won the Fiction Book Award. It also received the Australian Booksellers Association Nielsen BookData 2017 Booksellers Choice Award.

Biography Ashley was born 1973 in Christchurch, New Zealand and arrived in Australia aged eight. Ashley has two children and is a self-confessed committed "twitcher".

Career She was the assistant director of Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival from 1999–2001. She also coordinated The Arts Queensland Award for Unpublished Poetry.

Her short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in The Age, The Lifted Brow, Australian Book Review, Overland, and Catamaran Literary Review.

Ashley's interest in birds motivated her 2016 historical novel, The Birdman's Wife, about Elizabeth Gould, the English illustrator who drew specimens collected by her husband, John Gould, for his books on birds.

Awards and honours The Bee and the Orange Tree was shortlisted for the 2020 Davitt Award for best debut crime book.

At the 2022 Queensland Literary Awards, Ashley was awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship valued at .

Works

(M.Phil Thesis)