Claire Varley lives in Victoria, Australia on Wathaurong country. Her debut novel
The Bit in Between was published in 2015. Her fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in many places, and she has coordinated community development projects in Australia and overseas, including remote Solomon Islands and with refugee and asylum seeker communities in Melbourne's outer north. This book was written and takes place on the lands of the Kulin nation, and the author pays her respects and appreciation to Elders and community past, present and emerging.
Claire Varley grew up on the Bellarine Peninsula and lives in Melbourne. She has sold blueberries, worked in a haunted cinema, won an encouragement award for being terrible at telemarketing, taught English in rural China, and coordinated community development projects in remote Solomon Islands.
Her short stories and poems have appeared in Australian Love Stories ('A Greek Tragedy'), Australian Love Poems ('Beatitude'), Seizure online ('Poll', 'Hallow'), page seventeen ('Once', 'Hamlet, Remus and Two Guys Named Steve'), Sotto ('in the name of') and [Untitled] ('The Nicholas Name', 'Behind Tram Lines'). In 2015 she was shortlisted for Seizure's Viva la Novella 2 competition. Oh, and when she was sixteen she was the Victorian state winner of the secondary section of the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Award for a very depressing poem about life in the outback. They read her poem at school assembly.
Her debut novel, The Bit In Between, is a whimsical and poignant exploration of first loves and true loves, travel and the search for identity.
