Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels Salvage (Picador, 2025) The Airways (Picador, 2021), Dyschronia (Picador, 2018), Gone (UQP, 2011) and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight (UQP, 2012). In 2026 Salvage was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year.

The Airways was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards for horror. Dyschronia was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most prestigious prize for literary fiction, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and the Aurealis Awards for science fiction.

The Rest is Weight was shortlisted for the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards Steele Rudd Award for an Australian Short Story Collection and longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

In 2012 Mills was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist and in 2014 she received the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship from the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Previous awards include the Marian Eldridge Award for Young Emerging Women Writers, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and the Northern Territory Literary Awards.

Mills’ fiction, essays and criticism have been widely published, including in Australian Book Review, Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Essays, Griffith Review, The Guardian, Heat, Island, Lithub, Meanjin, The Monthly, New Australian Stories, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, The Saturday Paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Review of Books, and The Washington Post. Mills’ creative residencies include time at Varuna and Bundanon, an Asialink residency in Beijing in 2010, and a residency at Yaddo in NY in 2015. Mills was the fiction editor at Overland literary journal from 2012-2018. In 2022, Mills was Artist in Residence at Vitalstatistix. In 2025 Mills was awarded an SA Literary Fellowship and a Creative Australia Fellowship for Literature.

A passionate advocate for better working conditions for artists and writers, Mills is active in MEAA freelance campaigns and is currently Chair of the Australian Society of Authors.

Mills’ story, ‘The Childhood of the World,’ was commissioned by Slingsby for the triptych A Concise Compendium of Wonder which premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2026. A Concise Compendium of Wonder is also published as a book by Pink Shorts Press.

Mills lives on Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide) and is represented by Martin Shaw.

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Follow on bluesky: @jennifermills.net.au

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