Corrie Hosking

Corrie Hosking grew up in the Adelaide Hills, where she now lives with her partner, her children and a collection of animals.

Corrie’s early writing for theatre saw her win the Young Playwrights’ Competition with Magpie Theatre, the Colin Thiele Scholarship for Literature and be chosen as an Australian representative for Interplay — the International Young Playwrights’ Festival. Her writing and research have been supported by the South Australia Youth Arts Board, the Queen’s Trust for Young Australians and the Australia Council for the Arts. Her short stories and articles have been published in Iron Lace, Working with the Stories of Women’s Lives and Forked Tongues.

The manuscript of her first novel, Ash Rain, was the inaugural winner of the Adelaide Festival Award for an unpublished manuscript in 2002. It was subsequently published by Wakefield Press in 2004. Corrie has presented at the Sydney Writers’ Festival — the result of being chosen as one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists, 2005 — and at Adelaide Writers’ Week.

She has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Drama, a PhD in Creative Writing, an honours degree in Social Work and a graduate qualification in Narrative Therapy. Currently, Corrie is loving her kids, working with children in community health, training for her teaching certificate in classical ballet and has an Australia Council grant to draft her third novel. She likes to keep busy.

Books by Corrie Hosking

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  Eating Lolly

  Eighteen–year–old Mumma is pregnant and abandoned on a remote island by her respectable family. Her only company is a neighbour, a youth she calls Mister who brings offerings of fresh fish, and her only consolation is feeding her beautiful daughter Lolly on the recipes her mother taught her.

  Yet in her isolation, Mumma spins a haven of light and warmth that beckons Mister (a boy who knows all about abandonment, his mother having run off years before) and allows the two of them to forge an unlikely affection. It also allows Mumma's child, Lolly, to grow unaware of the dark secrets surrounding her.

  Yet Mumma cannot protect Lolly from the world forever. At school there are plenty of people willing to point out to Lolly how eccentric her family is, and that Mister is not her real father. It's a subject she cannot broach with her mother, any more than she can talk about the way her baby sister died at birth, and how she has always felt responsible. Eventually, Lolly's distress manifests in a desperate effort to exert control in the only way she can - by controlling her own body.

  This richly textured novel weaves the pleasures of cooking and the freedom of daydreams into a story of a young woman's fierce resilience, rending vulnerability, and unexpected love.

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