Cirrus@Austlit

A Member of the Order of Australia for her contributions to literature, Sophie has been a director of the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) since 2020 and the Chair of the ASA since 2022. She has also been a non-executive director of the Copyright Agency since 2022. In 2023-24, she was the Miegunyah Creative Fellow at the University of Melbourne and was an Adjunct Professor in the School Media and Communication in the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT from 2016-2022.

Sophie has written multiple books, as well as editing one anthology and appearing in several others. Her books for adults are This Devastating Fever (2022), Wonder: 175 Years at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, co- authored with Peter Wilmoth (2021); Fire, Flood, Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020 (ed (2020); Melbourne, (first published 2011, reissued 2020); City of Trees: Essays on life, death and the need for a forest (2019);& Warning: The story of Cyclone Tracy ( 2014); Bird ( 2008) and Geography (2004). She has published books for children on animals facing environmental challenges: Tippy & Jellybean (2020), Flipper & Finnegan (2022) with Mango and Hopscotch, the third book in the trilogy coming out in 2025. She has written for a range of magazines, including the Age, Meanjin, Griffith Review and The Monthly. She teaches creative writing for the Faber Academy.

Her books have been long and shortlisted for various awards, including her shortlisting in the First Novel section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2004 for Geography, and her shortlisting in the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for her novel This Devastating Fever. In 2017, she was awarded the Nature Conservancy's Nature Writing Prize for her essay, 'Biyala Stories’ and she won Australian Book Review’s Calibre Prize for her essay ‘Staying with the Trouble’ in 2015. 

Sophie was a co-founder and the founding Chair of The Stella Prize. She was the editor of Meanjin from 2008 to 2011 and was chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts from 2011 to 2014.  She was an editor at McPhee Gribble Publishers both when it was independent and after it was  incorporated into Penguin Books (1988-1992). She was the publisher of McPhee Gribble/ Penguin from 1992-1994, Trade Publisher at Allen & Unwin from 1994-2003, and a publisher at Lonely Planet from 2007-2008.