Jennifer Rowe


Jennifer June Rowe, is an Australian author. Her crime fiction for adults is published under her own name, while her children's fiction is published under the pseudonyms Emily Rodda and Mary-Anne Dickinson. She is well known for the children's fantasy series Deltora Quest, Rowan of Rin, Fairy Realm, Teen Power Inc., the Rondo trilogy, and The Three Doors trilogy and her latest His Name Was Walter.

Biography

Jennifer Rowe was born in Sydney, New South Wales, on 2 April 1948, and raised with two younger brothers on Sydney's North Shore. Her father was Jim Oswin, the founding general manager of ATN7 in Sydney, and was responsible for classic 1960s TV shows such as My Name's McGooley, What's Yours? and The Mavis Bramston Show.
She attended the Abbotsleigh School for Girls on the Upper North Shore of Sydney. She attained her Masters of Arts in English Literature at the University of Sydney in 1973. Her first job was assistant editor at Paul Hamlyn publishing. She later worked at Angus and Robertson Publishers, where she remained for fourteen years as editor, senior editor, managing director, deputy publisher and finally publisher. During this time she began writing children's books under the pseudonym Emily Rodda. Her first book, Something Special, was published in 1984 and won the Australian Children's Book Council Book of the Year for Younger Readers Award. She has now won that award a record six times.
From 1984 to 1992, Rowe continued her career in publishing, then as editor of the Australian Women's Weekly, while writing novels in her 'spare time'. In 1994 Rowe became a full-time writer. She now divides her working day between consultancies for book publishers and her own writing. She lives in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales with her husband Bob Ryan and her four children. She enjoys reading murder mystery novels, which have inspired her to add mysterious plots and hidden clues to her works.
Rowe's acclaimed Verity Birdwood murder mysteries for adults, written under her own name are: Grim Pickings , Murder by the Book, Death in Store, The Makeover Murders and Stranglehold. Later she also wrote about Homicide Detective Tessa Vance in Suspect and Something Wicked, and both books were incorporated as episode story lines in the Australian TV-show Murder Call. Rowe also edited a collection of crime stories Love Lies Bleeding and has contributed to the 1997 "Crimes for Summer" collection Moonlight Becomes You.

Emily Rodda

The most notable of her children's works, authored under the pseudonym Emily Rodda, are the series Deltora Quest, Teen Power Inc., Fairy Realm, Star of Deltora and Rowan of Rin. The pseudonym is based on her grandmother's name.
Total worldwide sales across all the Deltora Quest series have now exceeded 15 million. It has been published in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Japan, Italy, Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United Kingdom. A Deltora Quest anime series was broadcast on Japanese television in early 2007.
Among her other successful novels is the 1990 science fiction novel Finders Keepers, which was made into a television series called The Finder, and the Teen Power Inc. series, a mystery series involving six teenagers, both of which are written for young adults.
Rodda's Star of Deltora series is set in the same world as Deltora Quest, The Three Doors and Rowan of Rin, and focuses on a girl, Britta, who wants to be a trader like her father and sail the nine seas. The first book, Shadows of the Master, was released on 1 August 2015, the second book, Two Moons, on 1 November 2015, the third book, The Towers of Illica, on 1 April 2016, and the fourth and final book, The Hungry Isle, on 1 September 2016.
A children's fantasy novel written by Emily Rodda titled The Shop at Hooper's Bend was released on 7 August 2017 by HarperCollins Australia, and on 27 July 2018 a children's fantasy novel titled His Name Was Walter was released too by HarperCollins Australia.

Awards

Fiction as Jennifer Rowe