Just heard today that it’s UQP’s (University of Queensland Press)70th birthday this month–and wanted to celebrate this great achievement of a great publisher by thanking them for launching me on my career as a published author–in more ways than one!

My very first published book, The House in the Rainforest, an adult novel set on the North Coast of NSW in the 1970’s and ’80’s, was published by UQP in April 1990. I will never forget the day I got the letter of acceptance from the late and greatly missed UQP editor Roseanne Fitzgibbon! (It was an amazing year, because just a few weeks after hearing from UQP, I got a letter from the then publisher at Angus and Robertson, Brian Cook, accepting my first children’s novel, Fire in the Sky, a time slip novel which was published in June 1990)

UQP also published my very first young adult novel, Sooner or Later (1991), an event which came about after the then editor of UQP’s YA list, the wonderful Barbara Ker Wilson, had written to me whilst The House in the Rainforest was being edited, to ask if I had any ms suitable for that age group: she had really liked the voice of my main character Kate, who, when the book starts, is sixteen years old. Barbara felt it was a very authentic voice and she wondered if I had anything that might work. Well, I as it happens, I did have a ms which had grown out both of living at the time in a small Australian country town and also losing my beloved grandmother back in France. I was pretty excited at being actually encouraged to send it in! So I sent it, Barbara and the UQP team loved it, and it was published in 1991.

I had another two YA novels books published by UQP after that–A Blaze of Summer(1992), which unlike the other two was set in France, and had supernatural/fantastical elements; and The Sun is Rising(1996), a companion novel–though not, strictly speaking, a sequel–to Sooner or Later.

I went on to have books with quite a few other publishers after that–but I will never forget the debt I owe UQP. From a very grateful author: happy 70th birthday to a wonderful publishing house–and may there be at least another 70!