Eva Hornung

Eva Hornung was born in Bendigo, Victoria in 1964. As Eva Sallis, she is a writer of literary fiction and criticism. Many of her works explore ideas on culture, exile and belonging. Her first novel Hiam won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for 1997, the Nita May Dobbie Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Courier-Mail Book of the Year 1999 and the National Fiction Award 2000.

She has studied Arabic intensively for seven years and travels regularly to the Middle East, particularly Yemen and Lebanon. She is working on translating stories from the Yemeni writer Abd al-Kareem al-Razihi, and has published two of these in the literary journal Heat in 2005.

The Marsh Birds, set in Iraq, Syria, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, won the Asher Literary Award 2005 and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year 2005; NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2006; National Fiction Award, Festival Awards for Literature 2006; and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book South East Asia and Pacific Region 2006.

Eva’s latest novel, Dog Boy was published in 2009 by Text Publishing in Australia. Publication in other countries followed: USA: Viking; UK: Bloomsbury; Canada: HarperCollins, Italy: Piemme; Germany: Suhrkamp; Netherlands: House of Books; Spain: Salamandra; Portugal: Presença; Brazil: Paz e Terra; France: City Editions; Russia: Centrepolygraph; Denmark: Klim; Sweden: Forum; Israel : Aryeh Nir Publishers. Forthcoming editions include: Marathi: Mehta Publishing; Hungary: Nouvion; Chinese (Complex): Apocalypse Press.

Dog Boy won the Fiction category of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2010. It was shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the ASL Gold Medal and the Literary Fiction Book of the Year, ABIA.