Poet, screenwriter and novelist Emily Ballou was born in the United States in 1968 and moved to Australia in 1991.

In 1996, she was a recipient of the Australian Film Commission’s New Screenwriters Scheme for her first feature screenplay, Sadie X-Ray. In 1997, she was awarded the Judith Wright Prize for Poetry for her poem, Enter.

She worked with Gillian Armstrong adapting Helen Hodgman’s Waiting for Matindi for the screen, and wrote the short film Mittens, which was Fox Searchlight’s 2004 contender for the Academy Awards. Her first novel, Father Lands, set during the desegregation of the school system in the United States, was published in 2002 and is currently being adapted into a film.

Random House published her first children’s picture book, One Blue Sock, and her second novel, Aphelion, was recently published by Picador. Emily was named one of The Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists of 2003.