Sophie Cunningham
| Sophie Cunningham | |
|---|---|
| Born |
26 December 1963 Melbourne |
| Occupation | Writer, editor, Current Chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. |
| Nationality | Australian |
Sophie Cunningham (born 26 December 1963) is a Melbourne-based writer and editor.
Cunningham was publisher at McPhee Gribble/Penguin for two years and Trade Publisher at Allen & Unwin for ten, where she was known for commissioning and editing innovative fiction and non-fiction. At McPhee Gribble the books she worked on included I Was a Teenage Fascist by David Greason, Glad All Over: The Countdown Years 1974–1987 by Peter Wilmoth and Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave.
At Allen & Unwin she published Mark Davis's Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism.
In 2004, her own first novel, Geography, was published. In 2005 she was an Asialink resident in Sri Lanka, which provided research material for her novel Bird, which follows the life of a singer-actress who became a Buddhist nun.
Her non-fiction book Melbourne was published in 2011. Part memoir, part history, it is a portrait of the city as experienced through her own memories over the course of a year. In 2012 it was longlisted for the National Biography Award.
As of April 2012 she is working on her third novel, This Devastating Fever, about Leonard Woolf's time as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, and a non-fiction book, Warning, on Cyclone Tracy and other extreme weather events.
Cunningham has also written journalism, including travel writing, cultural analysis and writing on Buddhism and television. From 2002 to 2005, she wrote the Couch Life column for the television section of The Age.
In 2008 Cunningham became the editor of Meanjin and aimed to make the literary magazine "lighter, more fun, but I don't mean lightweight." She also aimed to establish a younger audience for the magazine.
During her time as editor, Cunningham significantly expanded the magazine's online presence and launched several successful public events in Melbourne and Sydney (notably Meanland, in collaboration with Jeff Sparrow, editor of fellow literary journal Overland) to lead public debate on issues around digital publishing.
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