Born and raised in Malta, award-winning Western Australian writer Rosanne Musu received her education and her most significant youthful and early adult experiences in the Mediterranean. Three years after emigrating to Australia, aged 29, and while living in the New South Wales town of Narrandera she had her first piece of writing published. Since then she has been involved in professional publishing both in Australia and overseas, working variously as editor, feature writer, journalist, workshop facilitator, lecturer, teacher (LOTE) literary editor, book reviewer, graphic artist, slush pile reader, and manuscript assessor among other pursuits. Her output as a writer includes novels, short stories, poetry, articles, reviews, and columns and poems. Most of her body of work is available in paperback and ebook formats. From the early 1990s Musu also began publishing with the surname Dingli. She has been professionally as Rosanne Dingli since 1994.
Dingli's first major work to published (as Rosanne Musu) was her collection of poems, All the Wrong Places (1991). After being out of print for a number of years the collection was republished in 2011, credited to Rosanne Dingli. Her debut novel, Death in Malta, was launched by Jacobyte Books in 2001. Dingli’s stories tend towards intense concern with location and atmosphere, with her narratives combining diverse meanings of intimacy experienced by a fascinating assortment of characters, at different times, in different places.
Since the early 2010s Dingli's works have been published in both hardcopy and digital formats through Yellow Tea Pot Books, the publishing company she founded in Perth in 2012. Yellow Tea Pot Books also publishes the works of a select group of writers, including Margaret Sutherland, Stephen Crabbe, Antonio Casella, and Dale Harcombe.
During her career Dingli has been shortlisted and/or commended for more than twenty writing awards. Among those she has won are the Springvale Awards, Victoria 1994 (for 'A Great Intimacy'), the Kwinana/Westwrite Prize, Western Australia 1993 (for 'Eating the Anniversary Moon'), the Patricia Hackett Prize - Westerly 1995 (for 'The Pomegranate Tree'), the Western Australian FAW Lyndal Haddow Award 1998 (for 'Walking into the Sea'), and the UKA Golden Egg - UK Authors Weekly Challenge, May 2011 (for the poem 'Bishop').
Dingli, who has spoken three languages fluently since her early childhood, retired from teaching in 2009 in order to concentrate on writing. Her last position as a teacher was with the Italo-Australian Welfare and Culture Centre Inc. She continues to travel widely, notably to Italy, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Greece, South East Asia, Holland, and Belgium, as well as most Australian states.
[Sources include www.rosannedingli.com]
