Yvonne Fein

Yvonne Fein is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, an experience that drove her to write about the fallout creatively, to investigate it academically and seek answers from religion unsuccessfully. Former lecturer at the Jewish Museum of Australia, she holds a Diploma of Creative Writing and completed an M.A. in Classical Jewish Text. Her previous publications include two adult novels —April Fool and The Torn Messiah — and one YA novel — Rachel Racing Time. 

In 2001, April Fool was short-listed for the Ned Kelly Awards in the ‘Best First Crime Novel’ category. In 2014, she won an award in the Gotham Screenplay Competition (New York) for screen adaptation of April Fool and was a semi-finalist in the Rhode Island Film Festival. Her theatre work includes one-act plays read by the Melbourne Theatre Company and a full-length drama, On Edge, which had a season at the Universal Theatre in Melbourne. Her play, Smash the Glass: A Celebration of Women, performed to a sell-out audience in Melbourne, and was invited to the Magdalena Festival in Brisbane. She has edited Generation and The Melbourne Chronicle — both literary journals — and award-winning Holocaust memoirs by survivors, most notably, The World of My Past (Abraham Biderman, Random House). 

Her essays, articles, reviews and short stories (six of which appear in this collection) have been published in Australia, the US and the UK in over 15 journals, newspapers and anthologies. ‘Weintraub’s Disorder’ and ‘Taunting the Abyss’ were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017. 

She has been a writer-in-residence at a number of Melbourne schools and lectures extensively on literature and writing. Most recently she conducted creative writing workshops for people suffering mental illness and, as part of an advocacy group for people with disability, she has, improbably, performed stand-up comedy to bring their case to the public’s attention.