Rosalie Ham
| Rosalie Ham | |
|---|---|
| Born |
13 January 1955 Jerilderie, New South Wales Australia |
| Occupation | Novelist Literature academic |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Period | 2000–present |
| Genre |
Black comedy Gothic fiction |
| Spouse | Ian McLay |
| Website | |
| www |
|
Rosalie Ham (born 1955) is an Australian author, stage and radio play writer. She is best known for her debut novel, The Dressmaker, which has been adapted into film with Kate Winslet in the lead role.
In addition, Ham has also written short stories for various Australian publications, including Meanjin, The Age, and The Bulletin. As of 2015, her novels have sold 75,000 copies worldwide and have been translated into a number of languages including German and French.
Ham was born and raised in Jerilderie, Australia. Talking about her childhood Ham said, "Being a farmer's daughter, I had a fabulous childhood – swimming in creeks and irrigation channels, riding a horse behind a slow moving flock of ewes, rousabouting, cutting wood and setting the fire after school every day in winter, learning to drive aged nine so I could help with Bathurst burr cutting and other slow-moving country driving tasks." She attended Finley High School for two years. Ham's brothers still run the family farms in Jerilderie. Later she attended St Margaret's School, Melbourne, along with Sue Maslin and finished her secondary education in 1972.
After completing her secondary education, Ham travelled overseas and on her return took admission in Deakin University (then Victoria College). She completed a Bachelor of Education majoring in Drama and Literature in 1989. On the request of her friend, she started writing stage and radio plays. She wrote four plays but soon find out that "(she) didn't want to write plays because I didn't like the theatre thing".
Ham has described herself as an "accidental novelist". In 1996, she enrolled in the writing programme of RMIT University but on her arrival she found that it was already full. As she was leaving, novelist Antoni Jach advised her to take a novel course instead. In novel-writing class, she got an assignment of "a 500-word synopsis of her book", which she recalled "I had an idea and started writing it. Then you had to hand in 3,000 words, and then you had to hand in 10,000 words, and I had 30,000 words. It was only three weeks before I realised that this was the best 'accident' that had ever occurred to me." Ham completed this novel in three years. She graduated from RMIT with an Advanced Diploma of Arts in Professional Writing and Editing in 1996, and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 2007.
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