Rozanna Lilley

Poet and essayist

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2022 Red Room Poetry Fellowship Shortlist

Rozanna Lilley has been shortlisted for the 2022 Red Room Poetry Fellowship.

Each year, the Red Room Poetry Fellowship is awarded to a previously-commissioned poet to foster and enhance their poetic and professional development. Established to recognise and develop the achievements of contemporary Australian poets, the Fellowship supports the artistic growth of the individual as well as the wider community.”

The 2022 shortlist of ten contemporary Australian poets includes a diverse selection of established and emerging poetic voices. The panel of judges, “Were frankly astounded by the strength of the applications received this year. The diversity, inventiveness and calibre of both proposals and accompanying poetry made the judging process extremely challenging”.

Poems were commissioned from each of the shortlisted poets, of which Red Room have published three of Lilley’s: Blanche’s Valentine, Humbug, and The Beechworth and North-Eastern Agricultural and Horticultural Show.

Rozanna’s Curious Life on Radio National

In August 2020 Rozanna appeared on Conversations on ABC’s Radio National.

Lilley was raised in a vibrant artistic family as the youngest child of the writers Merv Lilley and Dorothy Hewett.

******A warning: this conversation deals directly with some very confronting material and may be distressing.

Behind the Story with Rozanna Lilley

In this interview for The State Library of NSW, Lilley describes the process of writing Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life, which was shortlisted for the 2019 National Biography Award. The six shortlisted authors were asked to share the most surprising thing they learnt about themselves or their subjects.

“Writing is a surprising process. No matter what genre  – academic work, creative non-fiction or poetry – I often don’t really know what I think about a topic or how I feel about an event until I write it out. There’s always a moment of dissonance when I read over what I have written, as if to say ‘did I really write that?’ Autobiographical writing, especially, is like a distorting mirror – the person looking back is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Sometimes it’s a better self; at other times, it’s someone I’m a little ashamed of. Most often, the words on the page reveal an intensely vulnerable self that I try to hide in daily life.

Writing Do Oysters Get Bored? was both an immensely enjoyable and a difficult process. When I started, I imagined it being humorous. I also hoped to be gentle. I was surprised to discover my depth of anger about some of my experiences in the past, but also that I had the bravery, perhaps the effrontery, to tell them.  As well, I uncovered the depth of my affection, let’s just be straight forward and call it love, for both my immediate and my natal family. Writing the story of myself, my autistic son and my parents, writers Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley, was partly an exploration of eccentricity, of the habits of mind that bind us all together. But it was also a way of trying to break free from that lineage, and to assert myself as an independent person with my own voice.

I hope that when people read Do Oysters Get Bored? they come to understand something about the impact, liberating and traumatic, of a libertine upbringing. Most importantly, I trust they will grasp the complexity of autistic individuals, the frequently original quality of their thinking and their capacity to reflect the oddities of convention back to us, enlarging the known world, and surprising us all, as they do so.”

2019 National Biography Award shortlist

Rozanna Lilley has been shortlisted for the National Biography Award.

Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life (UWAP) was included in the recently announced shortlist along with six other titles including Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador Australia), Rick Morton’s One Hundred Years of Dirt (Melbourne University Press), and The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay & Disaster (Text Publishing) by Sarah Krasnostein.

The judges have described the memoir as:

A finely observed reflection on the complexities of family relationships, aptly subtitled a curious life. Rozanna Lilley is the mother of an autistic son, Oscar, and the daughter of eccentric libertarians whose parenting left her own childhood “carelessly broken”. The book takes the form of a series of loosely linked essays and concludes with 44 intensely personal poems, truly poetry as memoir. The stories of Lilley’s childhood and her own parenting are beautifully and gently integrated. She reflects on caring for Oscar and her father, who is suffering from dementia, with tenderness and sensitivity. The recounting of her sexual abuse as a teenager is searing but restrained as Lilley carefully examines the long impact of childhood trauma.

“As a parent who has become a researcher on autism and child development, having first trained as an anthropologist, Lilley’s observations are informed and acute. The writing is poetic, subtle and nuanced. While clear about the difficulties and demands of raising a child with special needs, Lilley writes with tenderness and humour of the many pleasures and delights her beloved Oscar brings to family life.”


National Biography Award Judges

The National Biography Award has a total prize pool of $42,000. The overall winner will receive $25,000. The inaugural $5,000 Michael Crouch AC Award will be awarded to the best debut biography or memoir in honour of the late Library benefactor and former award supporter. In addition, each shortlisted author will receive $2,000.

Best of luck to all the shortlisted authors!