About Leah

Leah Kaminsky’s debut novel The Waiting Room won the Voss Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the Helen Asher Award (Vintage Australia 2015, Harper Perennial US 2016). 

Her second novel, The Hollow Bones (Vintage) won the 2019 International Book Awards in both Literary Fiction & Historical Fiction categories and the 2019 Best Book Awards for Literary Fiction. 

Her third novel, Doll’s Eye will be published by Penguin-Random House Australia in September 2023.

We’re all Going to Die has been described as ‘a joyful book about death’(Harper Collins, 2016). She edited Writer MD (Knopf US, starred on Booklist 2011) and co-authored Cracking the Code (Vintage 2015). 

Stitching Things Together was a finalist in the Anne Elder Poetry Award. She has written for the BBC, Huffington Post, Monocle, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Griffith Review, SBS, LitHub, The Rumpus, National Theatre, Griffith Review and Creative Nonfiction, amongst others. 

Leah has written for the BBCHuffington Post, Monocle, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, The Forward, Creative Nonfiction, Hunger Mountain, Antipodes, Metazen, Griffith Review, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The AgeSBS onlineChicago Quarterly Review, r,kv.r.y, Hippocrates Poetry Prize anthology, The Ampersand Review, [PANK], Voices, Australian Poetry, Quadrant, The Binnacle, Evening Paper, Victorian Writer, The Examined Life, Mattoid, Cordite Poetry Review, Transnational Literature, amongst others.

She was co-editor with Lee Gutkind of Issue #46 of Creative Nonfiction magazine. She is the former Poetry & Fiction Editor of the Medical Journal of Australia.

She has been awarded a Cove Park Fellowship (Bridge Awards/EIBF/Varuna) the McCraith Fellowship (RMIT University), the Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship for Fiction (Varuna), a Bundanon Fellowship, the Varuna-Griffith Review Fellowship, the Billila Bayside Council Fellowship, Glenfern Fellowship (Writers Victoria) and a Varuna Publisher’s Fellowship.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts (USA) and a BA in Literature from Deakin University.