Glenda Adams - Literary Career

Literary Career

Adams started writing at the age of 10, with the encouragement of her mother.

While at Columbia University, she joined a fiction workshop and started writing using her real name, having used a male name prior to that to prevent her friends knowing she was writing fiction. Her short stories were published in such magazines as Ms., The Village Voice and Harper's.

After 16 years away, she returned to Australia and became writer-in-residence at the University of Western Australia, University of Adelaide and Macquarie University. Her literary friends included Australians Robert Drewe and Kate Grenville (for whom she was also a supervising Associate Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney along with Paula Hamilton for Grenville's Doctorate of Creative Writing in 2006), and the American Grace Paley.

In 1987, her second novel, Dancing on Coral won the Miles Franklin Award and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award but a residential rule for the latter resulted in her being denied it. Instead, the prize money was used for a fellowship for a young writer and she was compensated with a special award (with no money attached). Her third novel, Longleg, published in 1990, was also an award-winner. Her fourth novel, The Tempest of Clemenza was published in both Australia and the USA in 1996, and in 1998, her play, The Monkey Trap, was performed at the Griffin Theatre, in Sydney.