Melissa Ashley

Melissa Ashley (born 1973) is an Australian novelist. At the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards, her novel The Birdman's Wife won the Fiction Book Award. It also received the Australian Booksellers Association Nielsen BookData 2017 Booksellers Choice Award.

Biography
Ashley was born 1973 in Christchurch, New Zealand and arrived in Australia aged eight. Ashley has two children and is a self-confessed committed "twitcher".

Career
She was the assistant director of Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival during the period of 1999–2001. She has also co-ordinated The Arts Queensland Award for Unpublished Poetry.

Her short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in The Age, The Lifted Brow, Australian Book Review, Overland, and Catamaran Literary Review.

Ashley's interest in birds motivated her 2016 historical novel The Birdman's Wife, about Elizabeth Gould, an English illustrator who drew specimens for her husband John Gould's various books on birds. Ashley wrote the novel as part of her PhD whilst studying at the University of Queensland.

The Bee and the Orange Tree was shortlisted for the 2020 Davitt Award for best debut crime book.

At the 2022 Queensland Literary Awards, Ashley was awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship valued at A$15,000.

Works

 * (M.Phil Thesis)
 * (M.Phil Thesis)
 * (M.Phil Thesis)