L.M. MERRINGTON

I was born in Melbourne, Australia. An only child, I grew up reading extensively and imagining myself into my favourite stories – for several years I was the unknown sixth member of the Famous Five. My first story, written at age six, was a terribly derivative fairytale called ‘Rose Red and the Nine Pixies’, but it started something and I’ve barely stopped writing since.

First published at age 12, I wrote a series of half-finished fantasy novels and angsty poetry throughout my teenage years, before completing a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) at the University of Melbourne, majoring in media and communications and Chinese, and freelancing extensively as a journalist. My journalism and academic writing has appeared in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Bulletin, East Asia Forum, Inside Story and South Asia Masala, among others. Deciding that I liked research, I then went on to do a PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra, where I researched China–India relations, but I quickly realised that writing a dissertation left little time for writing anything else. After graduating in 2012, it took participation in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) to get my creative juices flowing again, and I completed my first novel, Greythorne, in late 2013. I’m currently researching bushrangers and ghost trains for my next novel, The Iron Line, as well as endeavouring to finish an academic monograph, tentatively titled India and China in the Asia-Pacific, 1890–2030 and running my own communications consultancy, Pure Arts Communications. In 2017 I released my first non-fiction book, Communications for Volunteers: Low-Cost Strategies for Community Groups. I can be contacted here.