April 3
We’re delighted that Julia Archer has kindly agreed to be our judge for the Short category (max 500 words).
Julia grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, in Singapore and in Canberra. She studied for her BA at ANU, and, newly married, moved to PNG. Her two children were born there, the second in a remote rural hospital, an adventure story in its own right.
The young family moved to Darwin in time to experience the night of terror that was Cyclone Tracy, followed by an epic road trip south to Canberra, where they briefly settled. Their last move as a family was to the Adelaide Hills. There they lost a second house to a natural disaster, in the Ash Wednesday bushfires.
A few years later, as empty nesters, Julia and her husband went to live and work in Pakistan for ten years, travelling often to other parts of Asia, and in Europe and North America.
Julia had written short fiction over the years, but Pakistan provided so much rich material that she decided to study writing craft formally.
On her return to Adelaide she gained a Masters in Creative Writing at Adelaide University, and then a PhD at Flinders University. This required writing two novel length manuscripts, which drew on her daily life and travels in Pakistan.
Julia next took up an opportunity to live and work in Kazakhstan for nineteen months. She was fascinated to find a whole new Central Asian culture, with its history in the Russian empire, not the British. More overseas travel followed, and Julia continued to write fiction, poetry, book reviews and occasional Christian devotional pieces.
Some of her short stories have been published in the anthologies Inscribe, Stories of Life, Tales From the Upper Room (Tabor), If They Could Talk, and others. In 2023 Julia won the Caleb Award for Unpublished Fiction, for a YA novel set in a future Adelaide.
During these years Julia supervised three candidates in the Tabor Creative Writing Masters programme, and later was an examiner for the programme.
In 2016 Julia set up her website, which she plans this year to overhaul. On the site she posts her short YA and Middle Grade fiction, along with book reviews and writing tips for beginning young writers. Her short children’s stories online have had, combined, almost 20,000 readers, who rated them eight to nine stars.
Julia has been a member of a writers’ critique and support group for many years, as well as the online groups Australasian Christian Writers and Christian Writers Downunder. She believes that supporting and encouraging other writers is an integral part of a writing career. Her own writing has benefitted beyond measure from fellow writers’ critiques, interest and encouragement.
Her Christian faith and involvement in a local church has been integral to Julia’s life since childhood. She hopes those values and world view are expressed in stories that, ultimately, are infused with hope and caring for others.
Her other interests remain travel, photography, being surrounded by beauty in nature or in art galleries, and a new love found late in life, her guitar.
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