Dr Sally Breen has been writing and publishing creative non-fiction and stories since the early-nineties. Her work has appeared widely in national and international journals and anthologies with features in Asia Literary Review, Meanjin, Open Road Review, The Age, Best Australian Stories, Review of Australian Fiction, The Guardian London, Veranda, Overland, The Australian, Hemingway Shorts and Griffith Review. She is a regular contributor to The Conversation. In 2009 Sally won the Varuna Harper Collins manuscript prize for her memoir The Casuals. She went on to sign a two book deal with Harper Collins which saw the release of the Casuals in 2011 and her debut novel Atomic City in 2013 – shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards Book of the Year People’s Choice in 2014. Sally has a wide ranging interest in the arts and has been actively involved in various ventures and initiatives. While studying in the nineties Sally set up The Arc a multi-arts venue above a fish and chip shop fondly remembered by many Gold Coasters as one of the city’s only alternative arts venues of the era. Back in Brisbane in the early new millennium Sally founded Burn Writers Collective an organisation set up to promote opportunities for young and emerging writers in South East Queensland. Burn ran Writing The Fringe Festival a bad sister event to the Brisbane Writers Festival. Many of Burn’s members have gone on to various high profile careers in the literary arts. Sally now actively supports and mentors young writers via Smallroom Writers Collective a group which runs a monthly reading series with guest authors on the Gold Coast. She is a board member of the Regional Arts Development Fund for the Gold Coast City Council and director of Books for Bali a charity set up to collect and distribute English language texts in Bali. Sally is Chair of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators, an organisation dedicated to raising the profile of Asia Pacific literature. APWT hosts a major networking event in a different city in the Asia Pacific each year. Sally is Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing at Griffith University. She is currently working on various book projects including a new novel and a collection of creative non-fiction.
PRESS — THE CASUALS
The great, unforgettable undertow through The Casuals is the relationship between father and daughter, parent and child, and it is this that gives the memoir an at times unbearable poignancy. The book is a stunning example of how the honest, meticulous and beautifully rendered details of a supposed ordinary life can transcend into universality.
— Matthew Condon
Her evocation of grief is astounding in its emotional impact; I doubt I have read a more astute or moving account of a family hamstrung by sadness than Breen’s retelling of her father’s death.’
— Hanna Gatt, Sydney Morning Herald
This is a movingly sad memoir about the life of a girl (and then the girl as a young woman) about whom songs are written, caught in the spotlight of her beauty and her personality, the magic of which she does not quite understand, a spotlight which, in part, is shined intensely and confusedly by her father — it is a memoir of unquiet things told quietly but with courageous brio against a finally etched suburban background of the 1980s and 1990s.
— Frank Moorhouse
PRESS — ATOMIC CITY
This is a beautifully constructed novel, seamlessly meshing contrasting perspectives (and tenses) into a seductive whole.
— Jo Case, The Australian
Sally Breen lives and works on the Gold Coast, and that strip of high-density development on the beach works its way into much of her writing. With its high-rise skyline under a big sky, Surfers Paradise has been called a ‘pleasure dome’ by Frank Moorhouse. But Atomic City (published in 2013), set largely in the lofty apartment buildings and businesses that abut, and look out on, the beach, captures perfectly the grift and graft of this place.
— Liz Ellison, The Guardian
Sally is one of my favourite writers. She has great craft but none of the breathless pretence of Big-L literistas. Atomic City is a grafter novel of the Jim Thompson school. There are no good guys only bad guys you kind of want to hang out with anyway.
— John Birmingham