Formerly an advertising executive, Amanda O'Callaghan holds a PhD in English from The University of Queensland. In 2016, she was awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship to aid completion of her collection of short stories: the collection was published in 2019 as This Taste for Silence (UQP).
The collection was shortlisted for the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize for a single-authored short-story collection.