Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic, and the Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival.
Beejay’s literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appears in national arts publications and is increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and the New York Times.
Beejay’s award-winning short fiction has been published at home (including in Meanjin, Westerly and ABR) and abroad, and anthologized in Best Summer Stories, Best Australian Stories and Meanjin A-Z: Fine fiction 1980 to now.
In 2024 Beejay chaired the judging panels of the Stella Prize, the Marion Book of the Year Award (fiction), and the inaugural Paragraph Fellowship. An award-winning creative writing teacher, she has taught workshops across the globe, from Virginia to Cairo.
Beejay has stories to tell. She’s been kicked in the head by a mountain gorilla and stuck in quicksand; she eloped to Las Vegas, and drove to Timbuktu in a car held together with a bra-strap.
Beejay came to writing circuitously. She has worked as a seafood waitress, an internet forum moderator, a criminologist, an agony-aunt, a strategic policy boffin and an accidental economist. It is better for everyone that she now reads for a living. Although her to-read pile is alive and dangerous - taking over room after room.
Beejay grew up in regional and remote Western Australia. She has swum with freshwater crocs in the tropic north, and whales in the Antarctic south, and lived most places in-between. Incurably peripatetic - thirty-three houses, three continents and counting - she now lives and works in Canberra/Kamberri with a menagerie of critters. At last count: two springer spaniels - Rigby and Stella - and seven fancy rats (yes, rats).
Photo Credit: Elizabeth Bowling
Literary Representation:
Jane Novak Literary Agency
PO Box 774
Five Dock, Sydney NSW 2046
Ph: +612 9281 8648
Email: jane@janenovak.com
