Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an author and critic based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man, was published in 2016, followed by the novels Beautiful Revolutionary (2018), The Newcomer (2021), and West Girls (2023). Her works have been listed for numerous awards, including the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2025, she was a writer-in-residence at the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris. Hell Days (2026) is her nonfiction debut.

‘Woollett manipulates the structure of the crime novel, the suspense of the whodunnit, to destabilise the idea that there is ever one perpetrator of a crime … [her] prose is intellectual and deliberate … The Newcomer does a lot in its short pages, weaving together a story of grief and unhappiness with a compelling crime narrative.’

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an author and critic based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man, was published in 2016, followed by the novels Beautiful Revolutionary (2018), The Newcomer (2021), and West Girls (2023). Her works have been listed for numerous awards, including the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2025, she was a writer-in-residence at the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris. Hell Days (2026) is her nonfiction debut.

‘Woollett manipulates the structure of the crime novel, the suspense of the whodunnit, to destabilise the idea that there is ever one perpetrator of a crime … [her] prose is intellectual and deliberate … The Newcomer does a lot in its short pages, weaving together a story of grief and unhappiness with a compelling crime narrative.’

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an author and critic based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man, was published in 2016, followed by the novels Beautiful Revolutionary (2018), The Newcomer (2021), and West Girls (2023). Her works have been listed for numerous awards, including the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2025, she was a writer-in-residence at the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris. Hell Days (2026) is her nonfiction debut.

‘Woollett manipulates the structure of the crime novel, the suspense of the whodunnit, to destabilise the idea that there is ever one perpetrator of a crime … [her] prose is intellectual and deliberate … The Newcomer does a lot in its short pages, weaving together a story of grief and unhappiness with a compelling crime narrative.’