About Jo

Jo studied English at Leeds University in the UK and graduated with a Masters in Medieval Literature. During this time she fell in love with Icelandic saga, and wrote papers on the Arthurian and Robin Hood legends, all of which have influenced her fantasy writing. Funding her reading habit has taken many forms, and jobs all over the world have included being a painter and decorator, a potato chip grader, a teacher, a corporate trainer, a bookseller, an editor, and a manuscript assessor. Currently, when not working on her own novels, she manages to teach both sex ed and creative writing, although not at the same time.

Jo has always been an eclectic reader and movie tragic, but writing seemed like something other people did. She was never one to be scribbling tales in notebooks as a child. Instead, she saved her pocket money to obsessively add to her Ladybird series collection and watched favourite films on repeat to escape her noisy Italian family. She only picked up the pen when she needed a lifeline after the birth of her first baby, but by then she’d been studying how stories worked her entire life. She was awarded a Varuna residency in 2010 to workshop short fiction with Cate Kennedy and Robin Hemley of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short stories have won prizes, both in Australia and the UK, and have been read on the BBC and Radio National. They are published in The Age, The Best Australian Stories 2010 and The Best Australian Stories 2011, The Review of Australian Fiction, Shibboleth and Other Stories, WetInk and Westerly. Her story, Can't Take the Country out of the Boy, has been optioned for a short film.

Jo was awarded another Varuna residency and a Bundanon Fellowship to work on The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store, her first novel. While studying on the inaugural Faber Academy, it was signed by Scribe in its infancy and was subsequently published in Australia and the UK. In 2015, The Italians won the fiction category of the International Rubery Award and was long-listed for the New Angle Prize in the UK.

After that first historical novel inspired by her migrant family, Jo returned to her great love - fantasy - with her epic romantasy duology, The Branded Season, published in Australia/New Zealand by Pantera Press in 2022 and 2023 and by Angry Robot books in 2024 and 2025 .

Jo lives on Garigal land in Sydney's Northern Beaches.