Sian Prior

Sian Prior is a journalist, essayist, critic and award-winning short-story writer. She is also a teacher of journalism and creative writing, has been a broadcaster with ABC radio for 16 years, as well as being a musician and a singer.

Sian has been working as a freelance writer for over a decade. She contributed a weekly column to The Age newspaper for three years and writes opinion pieces, travel features, theatre, opera and book reviews for various Fairfax publications. She has written feature articles for Limelight, Rolling Stone, The Bulletin, A2, Good Weekend, The Big Issue, Habitat and other magazines.

Sian’s short fiction has been published in CONTEMPORARY SOUL (Visible Ink anthology 2005), XXI VISIBLE INKS (2009), TATTLE TALES (Visible Ink anthology 2006), NORMAL SERVICE WILL RESUME (Cardigan Press 2004) and THE SLEEPERS ALMANAC EDITION 7 (2011). Her essays have been published in Meanjin , TEXT journal and Rex Journal of New Writing. Sian contributed a chapter to the first Penguin anthology WOMEN OF LETTERS.

Sian is a winner of the Words in Winter short-story competition and in 2010 she was awarded a Glenfern Writers Studio Readings Fellowship. In 2012 Sian’s writing was short-listed for the Queensland Postgraduate Creative Writing Prize. The National Library of Australia recently archived Sian’s website as part of the Pandora project. In 2012 she was a judge of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award (VPLA) for Non Fiction and in 2013 she was on the VPLA Drama judging panel.

Sian’s first non-fiction book, SHY – A MEMOIR, was published by Text Publishing in 2014.