Jane Skelton writes poetry, short fiction and novels.
What the River Told Me, her poetry collection, has just been published (December 2021) by Flying Island Press. Chimera, (prose and poetry) was published in 2020 by Rochford Press. She has a short story collection Lives of the Dead and Other Stories (Spineless Wonders 2013). Her novella Flying Foxes was short-listed in the Carmel Bird Award and published as an eBook in 2015 by Spineless Wonders.
Jane Skelton’s short fiction and poetry have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies. These include Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal, Island Magazine, Australian Short Stories, Overland, Going Down Swinging, Hobo, Hidden Hands, Idiom, Telling Ways: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing, Falling Angels: a chapbook (Cordite Review), and Things that are found in trees and other stories (Margaret River Press). Her poem ‘The lake inside’ was shortlisted in the 2021 Newcastle Poetry Prize and published in the anthology. Her novel earth eaters was a winner in the 2010 LitLink Unpublished Manuscript awards.
Actors have given voice to her creative writing at Little Fictions events in Sydney and in the 2018 Story-Fest.
She has a doctorate in Creative Arts (University of Western Sydney). Jane is a casual academic and lives in the Blue Mountains, NSW.
“My stay at the Varuna Writers’ Centre in 2010 is etched in my memory. It was August, and there was an ever-present wind which made the house sing and the trees dance. Snow flurried out of the sky. It was a place of great energy, which I found I could transfer to my writing. My writing is greatly influenced by the natural world and has a strong sense of place. The land is a character, haunted by unresolved emotions.”
Jane Skelton