Cirrus@Austlit

Inez Baranay was born without nationality of Hungarian parents. She was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Diploma of Education. Although her first language was Hungarian, she has written and published in English. From 1987 to 1989, she was a member of the Immigration Review Panel of the Federal Department of Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs. She has worked in freelance journalism, editing and scriptwriting and has taught creative writing for the East Sydney TAFE College. She has also run writing workshops for women and community groups in country New South Wales, and participated in the Feminist Book Fortnight tour in September, 1989.

Baranay was a writer-in-residence at the Venice (Italy) studio for Australian writers funded by the Literature Board of the Australia Council in March and April 1990. She has read at Writers in the Park at the Harold Park Hotel in May 1989 and May 1990; at Carnivale and the Feminist Book Fortnight in September 1989; at Macquarie University in October 1989; at the Conference on Commonwealth Literature, Lecce, Italy, in April 1989; and at the ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) Conference in Brisbane in July, 1990. In 1992, she embarked on a two year stay in Papua New Guinea to work in the Australian Volunteers Abroad Program as an Executive Officer of the Enga Women's Council in Enga Province. While in PNG she worked with some writing and literature students at the University of Papua New Guinea - Goroka Teachers College, where she was the guest of the Language and Literature Department.

Baranay has also travelled in the United States, South-East Asia, Europe, Morocco and in India, where she spent a period of time as writer-in-residence at the University of Madras (2001) and held a Literature Residency granted by Asialink (2002). In 2007 she moved to Europe spending five months at Binger Film Lab in Amsterdam, then taking up a residency at the BR Whiting Library in Rome, granted by the Australia Council. In November 2011 she moved to Istanbul when the Turkish translation of With The Tiger was published and have lived there since.