Drusilla Modjeska (b. 1946), writer, feminist and academic, was born in England and moved to Australia in 1971 after several years in Papua New Guinea. Her doctoral thesis, on Australian women writers of the interwar years, stimulated public interest in many neglected female authors and informed her published works in the 1980s, including Exiles at Home (1981). Poppy, a fictional biography of her mother with a strong autobiographical undercurrent, was published in 1990; The Orchard in 1994. Both won NSW Premier's Awards for non-fiction, and her double biography of the Australian painters Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith, Stravinsky's Lunch, published in 1999, won a third. In 1993 she edited and contributed to Sisters, a series of essays and short stories by prominent Australian writers. Timepieces (2002) is a collection of Modjeska's essays about memory, art, truth and time. Recipient of the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society, Modjeska has taught at the University of Technology, Sydney, and held various fellowships at the University of Sydney. In 2012 her first work of fiction, The Mountain, drew on her period of residence in, and recent regular travels to, PNG, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Modjeska published her memoir Second Half First in 2015.
