Sonya Voumard

Sonya Voumard is an award-winning nonfiction writer and a former political journalist with the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Her most recent book Tremor (2024), a compelling account of living with a little-known movement disorder called Dystonia for most of her life, won the nonfiction category of Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 annual publishing prize for 2024.

Her three other books include The Media and the Massacre (2016) which was listed for a Nita B Kibble Literary Award and longlisted for a Stella Prize; and Skin in the Game (2018), the centrepiece of which is the fascinating revisitation in 2011 of an interview she did with Helen Garner when Voumard was a journalism student in 1980, an encounter that had ended badly at the time. Her first book Political Animals (2008) was a work of fiction inspired by her time working as a political correspondent in Canberra in the early 1990s.

Sonya’s essays and stories have been published in Griffith Review, Meanjin, Island and Neighbourhood. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from UTS where she taught nonfiction writing for nine years. She now lives and works in the Northern Rivers.