The lecturers of English and Creative Writing at Murdoch University

Simone Lazaroo - ImageMeet Dr Simone Lazaroo

Senior Lecturer, English and Creative Arts

"I’m always inspired by the range of interests and experience my creative writing students bring to their writing projects. I aim to give students strategies for writing as effectively as possible about these, and to provide them with creative and critical approaches to thinking about their writing. I consider discussion of a range of quality texts and group work-shopping of students’ work central to this.

"Student feedback on my creative writing workshops indicates they find them as engaging as I do.

"I believe creative writing can offer life-long tools for engaging with the world and with subjective human experience."

Education

  • Ph D (Edith Cowan University – winner of University Research Medal and Dean’s Prize), Graduate Diploma in Education (Murdoch University), Bachelor Arts (Curtin University)


Achievements

  • All three of Simone’s novels The World Waiting to be Made (Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1996); The Australian Fiance (Picador 2000) and The Travel Writer (Picador 2006) won the WA Premier’s Award for Fiction, and were shortlisted in national or international awards.

    Her short stories have been published in anthologies in England and Australia.

    She was a judge of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Australia/New Zealand/ South- East Asia region) in 2005, and was the David TK Wong Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia in 2001.


Research

  • My novels and short stories have involved research into the relationship between Australia, south-east Asia and the British Empire; loss; photography and other forms of memorialisation.

    My writing experience directly informs the way in which I design and teach creative writing units and supervise my research students.
    I emphasise the importance of research to my students’ writing projects.