RMIT welcomes writer, editor and publisher Sophie Cunningham as Adjunct Professor

A highly respected writer, editor and publisher with 30 years’ experience in the publishing industry will be an adjunct professor for the next three years in the School of Media and Communication collaborating with the non/fictionLab research group.

Sophie Cunningham was editor of Meanjin and an editor at McPhee and McPhee Gribble/Penguin before becoming a publisher of innovative fiction and nonfiction for McPhee Gribble/Penguin and Allen & Unwin.

She is the author of two books of fiction, Geography and Bird, and two of nonfiction, Melbourne and Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy.

Her essay ‘Staying with the Trouble’ won the 2015 Calibre Prize (Australian Book Review).

She was Chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for three years and is a founding member of the Stella Prize, a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing that champions diversity and cultural change.

Dr Francesca Rendle-Short, Co-Director of RMIT’s non/fictionLab, said Cunningham's appointment as Adjunct Professor is inspired because of her impressive standing in the literary community and her contribution to important and necessary debates of our times.

“She will bring to the School's programs and our creative research endeavours in the non/fictionLab sophistication and depth of experience embodied and manifest in her practice: artistry, acuity and industry knowledge,” Rendle-Short said.

Cunningam said she has always been enormously impressed by the quality of creative writing programs at RMIT and the group of exceptional people cooking things up in the non/fictionLab.

“I’m very excited about becoming a member of the non/fictionLab team both in terms of the ways in which it will support and expand my own practice as well as the collaborative and collegial possibilities it opens up,” she said. 

Cunningham will appear in Present Tense, Celebrate Writing @ RMIT on 2 December.

Story: Wendy Little