Associate Professor Julienne Van Loon

Julienne van Loon is the author of four critically acclaimed books, most recently The Thinking Woman (2019). Her first novel, Road Story (2005), won The Australian/Vogel's award and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best First Book) Asia and Pacific region award and the WA Premier's Award for Fiction. She has been the recipient of grants and awards from the Australia Council for the Arts, the WA Department of Culture and the Arts and Creative Victoria. Julienne's essays and short stories have appeared in journals such as The Monthly, Griffith Review and the Sydney Review of Books, and in anthologies published by Pan MacMillan, Fremantle Press, ABC Books and Black Inc.

Alongside her work as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, Julienne has made a significant contribution to teaching and research in the Creative Writing discipline as a Higher Degree Research (HDR) supervisor. She has been the principle supervisor for 8 PhD thesis completions and 5 Masters-by-Research thesis completions. Publications by her HDR graduates have garnered two TAG Hungerford Awards, a Calibre Essay Prize, a WA Premier's Book Award, and the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and have been short- or long-listed for the National Biography Award, the Miles Franklin Award and The Australian/Vogel's Award.

Julienne is an editor at TEXT journal and a peer assessor for literature at the Australia Council for the Arts.  In 2017 she became a Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. In 2019, her latest work of fiction was named joint winner of the $25 000 Grifith Review Novella Project.

Julienne is active in scholarly debate in the Creative Writing discipline, particularly around questions of creative production as research. Since 2011, Julienne has been researching scholarly approaches to play and playfulness and their implications for research practice. She is currently working on a series of articles drawing on interviews with leading Australian researchers on the role of play and playfulness in moments of discovery.

A new major work of fiction, currently in development, explores the relationship between housing, cost of living pressures and urban Australian culture. 

Active for a number of years as a Director of the Australian Society of Authors, an additional research interest is Australian author livelihoods and the cultural/public value of the local book.

Julienne is available by appointment.

Julienne is available to supervise Masters and PhD candidates in fields relevant to her research interests. 

•     PhD University of Queensland
•     MA (Hons) by Research University of Wollongong
•     Grad Dip Education (Higher and Further) Curtin University
•     B. Creative Arts (Hons) University of Wollongong

Director and Chair of the Australian Society of Authors 2015-2017

Peer assessor, Literature, Australia Council for the Arts, 207-2019

Editor, TEXT: Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, since 2016.