Joanna Baker is an award-winning author of murder mysteries. Her books are set in small villages and remote places. Devastation Road was reviewed in The Age of Melbourne as “outstanding”. Reviewers love that the books are intriguing and provide all the clues, cleverly concealed.
Sisters in Crime Australia awarded Devastation Road the Davitt Award for best Young Adult Novel. The Age described it as ” an outstanding first novel, a genuinely puzzling and intriguing murder mystery with a sophisticated grasp of character.”
“I aim to write page-turners and mind games. I’m fascinated by how we think about ourselves and other people and the world, what we say to each other, how we communicate, how we obfuscate … and how we lie.
I write about families and close friends, people who think they know each other really well. But maybe they don’t.”
Joanna was born and raised in Hobart, Tasmania.
Tasmania: stunningly beautiful, lonely, remote, with wilderness, wild coastlines and a complex and fascinating history. Tasmania is a gift for a crime writer.
Joanna feels immensely privileged to have been educated at The Friends’ School, Hobart, the Australian National University and RMIT, Melbourne. She lives in Hobart, and still spends much of her time in the wine and high county of north eastern Victoria.
“Murder mysteries can be absorbing puzzles and page-turners. But I don’t think they are junk literature, books to be read and then discarded.
They can touch on the largest of ideas. Mortality – what does it mean for our lives to know that they are finite, that we are all temporary? And knowledge – how do we acquire knowledge? What can we be certain of? What can we know about the inside of another’s head and heart? What is essentially unknowable?
In a way death and mystery are natural companions.”
You can read more here.
JOANNA BAKER 