Books:
City Knife - MidnightSun Publishing, 2023
C
Mountain Arrow - MidnightSun Publishing, 2020
River Stone - MidnightSun Publishing, 2019
The Heaven I Swallowed - Wakefield Press, 2013
The Quakers - Wakefield Press, 2008
A little more detail:
Rachel Hennessy’s first novel, The Quakers, won the Adelaide Festival Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and was published by Wakefield Press in 2008. The novel was described by John Birmingham as ‘un-put-down-able’. This manuscript was also long-listed for The Australian/Vogel Award, shortlisted for the Varuna Writers Centre Manuscript Development Program and winner of the ArtsSA prize for Creative Writing.
Press Quotes:
Australian Book Review:
'The Quakers offers a nuanced and accomplished case study of a troubled mind, leaving the reader to decide whether it is a criminal one.'
Independent Weekly:
‘Hennessy has created a taut, well-written novel that digs under the skin of teenage obsession, alienation, peer pressure and envy. ... [a] beautifully-crafted story.’
Rachel's second novel, The Heaven I Swallowed was Runner Up in The Australian/Vogel Award, and published by Wakefield Press in 2013. It was subsequently long-listed for the Nita B Kibble Award for an established female Australian writer.
Press Quotes:
Westerly:
‘Hennessy writes like a dream.’
Australian Aboriginal Studies:
‘Grace is a chillingly real symbol of the unresolved issues this nation still needs to confront. For this reason, The Heaven I Swallowed is an important book.’
Rachel's non-fiction works have been published in Saltbush Review, Overland, Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow and Daily Life.
She was a Hot Desk Fellow at The Wheeler Centre, writing a non-fiction essay on miscarriage which was subsequently long-listed for the inaugural The Lifted Brow Experimental Non-fiction Award.
Rachel’s short stories have been published in the anthologies: Scorchers: A Climate Fiction Anthology; Small City Tales of Strangeness and Beauty; Emerge: New Australian Writing; On Edge and The Body.
She is Lecturer in Creative Writing for the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is a manuscript assessor for Writers Victoria and has been an assessor on the Literature panel at Creative Victoria and the Australia Council.
She lives in Melbourne with her husband, two young daughters and a bearded dragon called Zazoo.