Author
In 2004, her own first novel, Geography, was published. In 2005 she was an Asialink resident in Sri Lanka, which provided research material for her novel Bird, which follows the life of a singer-actress who became a Buddhist nun.
Her non-fiction book Melbourne was published in 2011. Part memoir, part history, it is a portrait of the city as experienced through her own memories over the course of a year. In 2012 it was longlisted for the National Biography Award.
As of April 2012 she is working on her third novel, This Devastating Fever, about Leonard Woolf's time as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, and a non-fiction book, Warning, on Cyclone Tracy and other extreme weather events.
Cunningham has also written journalism, including travel writing, cultural analysis and writing on Buddhism and television. From 2002 to 2005, she wrote the Couch Life column for the television section of The Age.
Read more about this topic: Sophie Cunningham
Famous quotes containing the word author:
““Have we any control over being born?,” my friend asked in despair. “No, the job is done for us while we’re sleeping, so to speak, and when we wake up everything is all set. We merely appear, like an ornate celebrity wheeled out in a wheelchair.” “I don’t remember,” my friend claimed. “No need to,” I said: “what need have us free-loaders for any special alertness? We’re done for.””
—Marvin Cohen, U.S. author and humorist. The Self-Devoted Friend, New Directions (1967)
“The author of these words,
Whose lifelong unconcern
Has been with flocks and herds
For what they didn’t earn.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“But with some small portion of real genius and a warm imagination, an author surely may be permitted a little to expand his wings and to wander in the aerial fields of fancy, provided ... that he soar not to such dangerous heights, from whence unplumed he may fall to the ground disgraced, if not disabled from ever rising anymore.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)