Biography

Bruce Russell was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1943. He was educated at Sydney Boys High School and Sydney University. He later graduated PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland. He is currently living in Mount Lawley, Western Australia. where he continues to work as a fiction writer, biographer, ghost-writer, editor and teacher.

He is the author of five novels: Jacob’s Air, The Chelsea Manifesto, Channelling Henry, The Museum of the Self and Reunion. He co-wrote Diamonds and Dust with Cheryl McCorry and two commissioned biographies, Blackie: The John Robert Blackburne Story and Under the Radar: The John Richard George Story.

His first short story, ‘The Fall of Icarus’, was runner-up in the Canberra Times National Short Story Competition. His stories have since appeared in Westerly, The Western Review and Indigo and been anthologised in Fictions 88, Friday’s Page, Lines in the Sand and The Kid on the Karaoke Stage.

For many years he was the fiction tutor at Writing from the Centre, Fremantle Arts Centre. He has lectured in writing at University of Queensland, Edith Cowan University, Curtin University and the University of Notre Dame, Fremantle. He has also served on the boards of the Australian Society of Authors and the Western Australian State Literature Centre and helped judge the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.

Grants, Residences and Awards

He has won residencies at Varuna, Capricorn Hill and the Norman Mailer’s Writer’s Centre in Provincetown, Mass. In 1995 he won the TAG Hungerford award for a first full-length work of fiction. Both Jacob’s Air and Channelling Henry were short-listed for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. He wrote Channelling Henry with the assistance of a Literature Board Developing Writer’s Grant. All of his other major publications have been supported with writing grants and travel assistance from Arts WA, with the exception of The Museum of the Self, which was backed by a University of Queensland post-graduate award.