This is the website of Francesca Rendle-Short, author of the novels Bite Your Tongue and Imago:
‘Reading can tickle and turn you upside down. Make your tongue hang loose. Reading changes things.’
notes
Francesca featured in the Courier Mail and Herald Sun
On Saturday 1 June Francesca and her story 'Glossus' from the new release Just Between Us (Pan Macmillan) was featured in the Courier Mail and the Herald Sun.
posted 1st June 2013
Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript
Francesca was the convenor of judges for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. The winner was announced on Thursday 23 May at the Gala opening of the Emerging Writers Festival.
posted 20th May 2013
Talking tongues and pig's heads
Francesca appeared on Radio National's Books and Arts Daily with Michael Cathcart. Here is the podcast.
The occasion was an interview with Kate Evans from Radio National's Book+ program in a salon at Avid Reader in West End, Brisbane on Friday 10 May 2013. She was talking about her book Bite Your Tongue.
posted 15th May 2013
2013 International Writer's Fellowship
Francesca has been awarded a $10,000 four-week International Writer's Fellowship to go to Iowa, United States. It has been awarded by the University of Wollongong and the University of Iowa Nonfiction Workshop thanks to support from the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
posted 1st May 2013
Field guide to writing a father
Francesca's 'Field guide to writing a father: piecing together a relationship' published by Overland Literary Journal is now online (#210). Read more here
posted 30th April 2013
All about Bite Your Tongue
“I think she has done it. Bite Your Tongue is all softness and breath, achieved by careful management of voice; finding it, demanding it, censoring it and best of all, controlling it … the mother’s final weeks, is beautiful.’ Annette Hughes, The Newtown Review of Books
‘Part fable, part fact, it illustrates Rendle-Short’s literary prowess, while also taking us on a tour of archives that reveals her mother’s actions as a moral crusader, and memorabilia from a childhood when “Queensland was innocent … the going was pineapple-sweet.”’ Donata Carrazza, Australian Book Review
The novel Bite Your Tongue by Francesca Rendle-Short was published by Spinifex Press in September 2011. It is a work of the imagination that draws on found documents in the archive and on the author’s memory of that time.