The Author

Marilla North was born in 1945 in Newcastle, NSW, into a family that uncannily resembled the fictional folk from 1 Murray Avenue, Parnell Place, overlooking Port Hunter in Dymphna Cusack’s WW II novel, Southern Steel, the book that ignited Marilla’s passionate commitment to Cusack’s life and work. 

Marilla wrote a book of well-intentioned verse for her mother’s birthday when she was just twelve and her  young adult poetry was published regularly in the Canberra Times over the early 1970s and, irregularly ever since, in journals such as  Refractory Girl, Meanjin Quarterly and Hecate-Interdisciplinary Journal. ANU Professor AD Hope mentored Marilla in developing her poetry collection, Blue Glass and Turtles’ Eggs, published by Jacaranda Press in 1975 – International Women’s Year.

After several years in the Federal Public Service, in the mid to late 1970s Marilla designed and conducted national media education research studies for the ABC and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.  In 1980-1981 she was appointed the NSW State Director of the United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP 1981). She went on to set up a Foundation for the NSW Conservatorium of Music. 

Marilla completed an MA Honours degree in post-colonial literature at Wollongong University in 1991 which included a dissertation on Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’ collaboration, the best seller Come in Spinner.  Over the 1990s Marilla lectured in literature and life writing whilst publishing freelance journalism and book reviews and conducting communications-related market research projects.

After nearly ten years spent caring for her aged mother, in 2014 Marilla was awarded the Alfred Midgley Post Graduate Fellowship from the University of Queensland which enabled her to pick up where she had left off in her biographical trilogy of the life and times of Dymphna Cusack and her “congenials.”  Marilla has been researching and writing this project since 1991, having worked on the epic saga of the writing and publishing of Come in Spinner with Dymphna Cusack’s co-author, Florence James, for over a decade before that. In 2001 UQP published her ground-breaking hybrid narrative Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters‒ Dymphna Cusack, Miles Franklin and Florence James, which won the 2001 FAW Biography Prize. 

Since 2001 Marilla has taught Australian literary and cultural history to American students at Boston University’s Sydney Programme. In 2014 she married Robert Jones, erstwhile friend and fellow Thespian from their Newcastle University College days in the early 1960s. They live in Leura in the upper Blue Mountains where they enjoy a creative community of kindred spirits.