Alison Booth


Alison L. Booth is an Australian labour economist and novelist who is professor of economics at the Australian National University. She is the author of five novels. These are Stillwater Creek, The Indigo Sky, A Distant Land, A Perfect Marriage and The Philosopher's Daughters.

Early life and education

Booth was born in Melbourne and grew up in Sydney. Her father, Norman Booth wrote an Australian war novel called Up The Dusty Track.
Booth has both a Masters of Economics and a PhD from the London School of Economics. Her dissertation under Tony Atkinson was on the microeconomic behaviour of trade unions and membership.

Career

Booth worked at the University of Bristol in the 1980s and was Professor of Economics the University of Essex from 1995 to 2013. She was editor-in-chief of Labour Economics from 1999–2004 and President of the European Association of Labour Economists from 2006–2008. In 2017, Booth received the Distinguished Fellow Award of the Economic Society of Australia. and in 2019 she was elected as fellow of the Econometric Society. She has worked in the areas of gender and discrimination in the labour force. Her research found that girls at single-sex schools are less risk averse than those at co-ed schools, perhaps due to the absence of "culturally driven norms and beliefs about the appropriate mode of female behaviour" and that women take more career risks when they are supported by other women. She has also called for recruiting due to her research into discrimination in callback rates for applicants with non-Anglo-Saxon sounding names.
Booth is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and of the IZA Bonn, and is an ANU Public Policy Fellow. She is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and of the Institute for Employment Research in Nürnberg.

Fiction

Booth has also published short stories and five novels.
The first book in Booth's trilogy, Stillwater Creek, "captures a particular time in Australian history – memories of the war are still relatively fresh, communism is the new fear, and social mores are still very conservative”. In an interview, Booth saidabout the town of Jingera, “I like to think of as... a stage on which a few actors play out the universal stories. Translated into French by Helene Collon for publication by Presses de la Cite in 2011, the novel was Highly Commended in the 2011 ACT Book of the Year Award, and was published as a Select Edition in 2011 by Reader's Digest in Australasia and in the UK.
Booth's second novel, The Indigo Sky, is set in late 1961. Booth "uses Jingera as a microcosm for the social and political issues faced by post-war Australia. ... weaves the gritty issues of paedophilia, racism and postwar trauma into her first book, and the removal of Aboriginal children and bullying into her second book, but manages to maintain a light and hopeful tone”. /> The final book in the trilogy, A Distant Land, is set in Jingera, Sydney and Cambodia in 1971. It focuses on "Human rights, civil liberties and war”.
Booth's fourth novel, A Perfect Marriage, is a "cleverly structured" story of middle-class "domestic violence" and its long term effects.
The fifth novel, The Philosopher's Daughters, will be published in the UK on 2 April 2020.

Personal life

Booth is married and has two daughters.

Select bibliography

Books