About
SASKIA BEUDEL is a writer and critic. She first trained as a visual artist, and writes across a number of genres.
In 2022 she was awarded a Copyright Agency Fellowship for Non-Fiction Writing and a Creative Australia grant to complete her fourth book.
Saskia is the author of non-fiction works A Country in Mind: Memoir with Landscape and Curating Sydney, and the novel Borrowed Eyes. Her books have been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, a Dobbie Award and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Her essays, reviews and scholarly articles are published nationally and internationally.
Her essays appear in Best Australian Essays, HEAT and The Iowa Review.
Her critical work appears in The Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review, ABR Arts, Sydney Review of Books, Artist Profile, Kill Your Darlings and Artlink.
Her scholarly articles are published internationally in edited collections.
She has held several research fellowships, including at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society in Munich (a joint initiative of the Ludwig Maximilian University and the Deutsches Museum), and at the University of Edinburgh.
A Country in Mind defies the conservative view, the taxonomical thundering, and all other attempts at generic border protection.
– Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Review of Books
Books such as Bruce Pascoe’s galvanising Dark Emu, Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful and Saskia Beudel’s walking memoir, A Country in Mind, are sceptical of any Romantic sense of boundless plenty and adept … at negotiating the rough terrain of broken country … each is tuned, as Beudel puts it beautifully, to the “off-key tone of colonised land”. One of the great strengths of such recent Australian writing is that it is never just about the present, but works its way back into the past to make us think hard about what we think we already know; and it gives us a more complex set of tools to think about the future.
– Delia Falconer, ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Sydney Review of Books
Beudel, a fabulous storyteller, has [created] a novel of exceptional knowledge and intelligence.
— Jenny Digby, Australian Book Review