Jessica White is a writer and academic. Her first novel, A Curious Intimacy (Viking, 2007), won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the Dobbie prize and the Western Australia Premier’s awards, and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. Her second novel was published in 2012 (Viking). Her third book, Hearing Maud, is a hybrid memoir that weaves together her experiences of deafness with those of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century expatriate Australian novelist Rosa Praed. Jessica’s short stories, essays, and poems have appeared widely in Australian and international literary journals and have been shortlisted or longlisted for major prizes. Jessica is also the recipient of funding from Arts Queensland and the Australia Council for the Arts, and has undertaken residencies in Hobart and Rome. She has a PhD from Birkbeck, the University of London, and currently lectures and researches at The University of Queensland, where she is writing an ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843), Western Australia’s first female scientist.