Welcome,

I am Marion Taffe, and my debut novel By Her Hand is out now in Australia and New Zealand with HarperCollins Fourth Estate.

All my life I have been a daydreamer, a loner, and lover of slow reading and storytelling. Story can be words on a page or a voice in our ear. For me, story has been different things at different times in my life. It has been drawing, dancing, rowing on rivers, swimming in lakes, watching birds and beetles and people. It has been tears cried and dead-end paths. Whatever it is for any one person at any one time, there is a world of worlds within us all.

I was born in Melbourne. My parents had bought the house for a good price because a murder victim had lived there. But we were not there long. We moved north to Magnetic Island in North Queensland where I made my earliest memories before me moved south again, this time to Ballarat. During my teen years I lived in my family’s historic Ballarat home, which was open to the public. That home was also near Lake Wendouree where I learned to row. I loved being out on the water alone in my single scull with the musk ducks and mayflies. Eventually I rowed for Australia in the Under 23 World Championships, finsihing fifth. I retired from rowing to concentrate on journalism, working at newspapers in Ballarat, Townsville, Manchester (UK), the Gold Coast and Melbourne, where I was national features and travel editor at mX for eight years.

After twenty years in journalism, I started writing the stories that had long lived in my imagination. I think I have always been interested in stories of nuns because my mother was a nun before she was my mum. I am also drawn to themes of belonging, striving, choice, women’s rage and the interaction between people and places.