Cirrus@Austlit

Born in New South Wales, of a Dutch father and Australian-born mother, Julienne van Loon was educated in public schools on the mid-north coast and in the central-west of the state. After completing high school in Dubbo, she studied creative arts at the University of Wollongong, majoring in English and Creative Writing. Her teachers at the University of Wollongong included poet Joanne Burnes and novelist John A Scott. After completing her Honours degree, she went on to complete a Masters by Research with the same school.

Van Loon worked for many years as a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Creative Writing program at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. She completed her PhD in English at the University of Queensland, under the supervision of novelists Amanda Lohrey and Jan McKemmish. She was also a prose advisor for Westerly.

Van Loon wrote her first novel, Road Story (2005) as part of her doctoral work. She won The Australian/Vogel’s Award with the unpublished manuscript for Road Story in 2004. Her following novels were Beneath the Bloodwood Tree (2008) and Harmless (2013). Her novella “Instructions for a Steep Decline” won the Griffith Review Novella Prize in 2019.

Van Loon’s first work of book length nonfiction, The Thinking Woman (2019), was highly commended for the Victorian Premier’s Award for Nonfiction in 2020.

She was Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow with the non/fictionLab research group at RMIT University (2015-2019). She was appointed an Honorary Fellow in Writing with the University of Iowa in 2017, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne in 2023.