Marie is in her late 50s and lives in Tasmania. She has spent 35 years writing what she fervently hopes is non-fiction, given it is doctor's notes. Immunology or Department of Obscure Diseases; remote area medicine, Kakadu; emergency medicine. She claims that her handwriting has survived. She generates ideas slowly, mostly while running in forest and mountains (it’s Tassie!!) resulting in ultramarathon distances and characters who get bashed about a bit. Miraculously, she doesn’t fall over or get lost as often as you think. She finds a lot of parallels between ultramarathon running and novel writing. She has been fascinated all her life by how animals work, is troubled by human responsibility towards them and the planet, and she bloody loves where she lives. Unsurprisingly, these things are what her first novel, The Diemen Alexander, is about. The DA is funnier and more charming than she is and hence managed to slip in the back door of Melbourne publishing house, Clan Destine Press and through there, escape into the wider world. Marie is enormously grateful to both of them. Like most novelists, she has a short story drawer in her desk. In 2022, she entered the Alice Sinclair Memorial Award, with a short story about a short boy called Billy Short, insightfully entitled “A Short Story”. Inevitably, it was short-listed. It is included the anthology Out of the Shadows 2023.