Dr. Anna Westbrook is NYU Sydney’s lecturer in Creative Writing and has recently been offered a book deal. Anna was shortlisted for the prestigious Australian/Vogel Literary Award for unpublished manuscripts by writers under the age of 35. Her debut novel, The Quiet Noise, will be published by Scribe Publications in 2015.
Dr. Westbrook’s novel The Quiet Noise is eloquent and spare, based on the real-life murder of a young girl in inner Sydney in the 1940s.
Dr. Westbrook, who has a PhD in creative writing, says of the book, “The Quiet Noise came from a chance dalliance in a coffee shop with a pictorial history of Newtown and a story about a murder in a cemetery. The cemetery I knew intimately – it was around the corner. The dark night in 1946 I knew nothing about, but could not shake. It took more than five years to listen to the noise and learn about the history of my community in those turbulent years after the Second World War and find the traces of that world left in this one. I’m thrilled to be publishing with Scribe because I want to see more diverse voices in Australian historical novels to tell the stories that the ghosts want told.”
The Quiet Noise will be published next year, but you those of you in Sydney can see Dr. Westbrook at the Emerging Writers’ Festival next week.