Cirrus@Austlit

Sarah Armstrong has been a reporter with ABC Radio and a researcher and producer for ABC Television. She has won a Walkley award for her journalism. In 2000, Armstrong moved to a rainforest area near Byron Bay to pursue writing and yoga teaching.

Sarah Armstrong was born in Sydney, Australia in 1968 and grew up in the New South Wales towns of Armidale, Gosford and Newcastle. Her family had no TV for most of her childhood and she was a prolific (if somewhat undiscerning) reader. The Armstrongs' weekly trips to the local library were legendary. Her parents, a psychologist and psychotherapist, helped bring Gestalt therapy to Australia in the late 1970's.

At the age of fifteen Armstrong went to live in Argentina for a year as an exchange student. She lived in the foothills of the Andes with a family who spoke no English. After graduating from Mitchell College, Bathurst with a BA in Communications, she joined ABC Radio as a trainee journalist, working on the flagship current affairs programs AM, The World Today and PM. In 1993 she won Australia's premier journalistic award, the Walkley, for a radio feature on diggers returning to Gallipoli. She joined ABC TV's Foreign Correspondent program as a researcher and field producer. Highlights of her time with Foreign Correspondent include an audience with Libya's Colonel Gadaffi, landing in the sub-Saharan town of Timbuktu in a sand storm and swimming in a jellyfish lake in Palau.

In 1997 she realised that the demands of journalism would always keep her from writing seriously so she resigned from the ABC and moved to the north coast of New South Wales. The year she moved into a small rustic cabin in an overgrown rainforest valley it rained relentlessly for several months, providing inspiration for her first novel Salt Rain.

One of her short stories, 'The Long Wet', has been made into a short film by Tristan Bancks, a Byron Bay filmmaker.

Armstrong has taugh writing classes and Writing and Yoga workshops around Australia and in Bali.

Source: The author's web site: www.sarah-armstrong.com