Hello. Hi.

So, writing has always been my first love. I wrote my first novel in grade two about a snake named Bronson coming to live with me and my family and causing trouble. I’ve always made sense of the world by writing about it…but when I was younger, I never considered it could be my job.

I grew up on the Gold Coast as an opinionated, quirky, theatre-loving, chubby kid, who never really felt like she fit in. When it came time to decide what I’d study after school I chose teaching, because I loved my high school Drama teacher, my writing was private, and I knew I didn’t want to be an actor. It felt like the only option. I, nor my parents, really knew what a career in the arts might look like. Teaching was safe.

I loved uni. I loved my degree. For the first time ever, I felt like I met people who got me. And I discovered I had a very natural knack for, and adored, working with teenagers.  

When I was twenty-five, and teaching, I couldn’t find a play suitable for the kids at my school and decided, quite offhandedly, to write my own. This play, fittingly called BLOOM, changed the trajectory of my whole life. BLOOM won the Queensland Theatre Young Writers Award (2008) and secured me a place in The Royal Court Young Writers Program in London (2009). I suddenly started meeting artists, having my work read aloud, winning grants, and studying more. It felt like being invited into a whole new world. So, I side-stepped teaching for a while and started working for theatre companies running their youth and education programs, creating big youth arts projects, while at the same time making independent theatre, producing, and learning the Australian theatre landscape.

In 2017 I made my main-stage directorial debut directing Michelle Law’s smash hit SINGLE ASIAN FEMALE, which has since toured to Sydney and Melbourne. In 2018, ten years after I won that first play writing award, I debuted my first main-stage production as a playwright, LYSA AND THE FREEBORN DAMES, a contemporary feminist riff on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata at La Boite Theatre. My whole heart is in both of these projects.

Another that I’m most proud of is TRACTION, the Queensland Theatre Logan Youth Ensemble. Where I worked every Wednesday as its lead artist, making theatre with a group of about sixty young artists in Logan for four years. It changed my life. It’s where I met the Mama’s Boys, a theatre collective made of thirteen, incredible, diverse, young male artists. We’ve been making a work called BOOK CLUB for the last few years, which was set to debut in 2020, but COVID-19 happened.

I LOVE working with young people. I believe they are almost always underestimated, and their art undervalued. Young people need adult allies to remind them that they are okay, exactly as they are. I believe that art changes young people, and young people will change the world. 

While all of this glorious stuff was happening I was secretly working away on my first novel…second, if you count Bronson’s exploits as legit. This was a scary pursuit, as it was the biggest, realist dream of them all – to be an author. In 2016 I won the Text Publishing Text Prize for my Young Adult novel BEAUTIFUL MESS. A dual narrative story about two teenagers dealing with life’s biggest, shittiest life stuff and learning to see its beauty. It’s been translated into multiple languages and I will never not be excited that my words are in a book that you can buy and read. My life trajectory changed again.  

I spent the next few years writing my second novel, which at the end of 2019, secured me a three-book deal with Text Publishing. I’ll be writing a glorious, adult romantic comedy a year for the next three years. IT’S BEEN A PLEASURE, NONI BLAKE, is a queer, pleasure-seeking romp that finds thirty-six year old Noni on a quest to try and right the wrongs of her sexual past and inject more pleasure into her life. It was released in October 2020.

At the end of 2019 I won a Queensland Premiers Literary Award Fellowship to write my second Young Adult novel THE INVISIBLES. And at the end of 2019 I secured a Screen Queensland Talent Fund Grant to adapt BEAUTIFUL MESS into a screenplay. The end of 2019 was fucking stellar…and then 2020 happened. Projects have been cancelled, things feel uncertain, but I’m still writing. Joy-centred, sex filled, empowering romances feel more important than ever right now.

I currently teach Acting at the Griffith University Conservatorium, and facilitate workshops for teenagers and teachers. 

I really wish getting tattoos didn’t hurt, that my pug Midge could talk, and that I could change my hair with an intentional blink. If I could have dinner with anyone at all it would be Oprah, Lindy West, Idris Elba and the entire cast of Dawson’s Creek – because CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?!?

Hey! I’m glad you’re here. Sign up to my e-news or come hang out on my socials.

Loads of love,

Claire.