Amanda Apthorpe
Author biography
Amanda Apthorpe PhD is an Australian writer. Born in Melbourne, she came late to writing following very early marriage and motherhood and a twenty-five-year career as a science teacher. During those years, she scribbled a few stories in rare spare moments, dipped her toes in the water of writing courses, then submerged herself in her first novel, Whispers in the Wiring, completed for a Master of Arts degree. Following the publication of this novel, and with an injection of confidence, Amanda took a leap of faith. She traded teaching science for teaching creative writing and completed her second novel A Single Breath as a component of a PhD. Each of these novels has been re-released by Next Chapter.
No sooner has the ‘ink’ dried on one novel, Amanda is writing the next. One Core Belief and Hibernia follow Whispers in the Wiring and A Single Breath into the Next Chapter catalogue, and she is currently working on the fifth novel: Quantum Entanglement.
Amanda’s inspiration for writing fiction comes from real life – her own, those she knows and has known, and draws on the brilliance and despair of the human condition in its everyday familiarity. Her characters are diverse – a priest raising his fifteen-year-old niece (Whispers in the Wiring), an obstetrician searching for redemption (A Single Breath), each member of family (Greek) struggling with their personal demons (One Core Belief), and a soon-to-be-divorced gallery manager hoping for her own renaissance on a small island (Hibernia). A common theme that imbues these novels is one that is significant in Amanda’s own life – to walk the middle path, to find the interface between faith and its absence, between the rational world of science and the intuitive world of the heart.
Drawing on her experience as a teacher of writing and editing at the tertiary level, Amanda is creating the Write This Way series of instructional guides to writing fiction. Individual volumes provide instructions, exercises and advice on topics such as: time management, finding your writer’s voice, creating strong characters, plot and structure, dialogue and description, and the editing toolbox. (to be published by Next Chapter). She has works published in academic journals, popular magazines, has presented at international and national conferences on writing, and has been interviewed on radio.
Amanda resides in Melbourne with her partner, Chris, various family members (as the need arises), and Pearl, the cat. She is a life-long student of yoga and, of course, an avid reader, which is where the love of the written word began and continues.
Praesent id libero id metus varius consectetur ac eget diam. Nulla felis nunc, consequat laoreet lacus id.