Maura Pierlot

Maura is an author, playwright and filmmaker based in Canberra. Her recent work across art forms explores the complex intersection between memory, identity, self and belonging. Tackling youth mental health themes, Maura’s acclaimed play, Fragments has been produced as a web series, supported by the ACT Government. The work will be launched in early 2023 alongside the second edition of the book, Fragments: Journeys from Isolation to Connection, a hybrid young adult fiction novel. 

Inspired by her music-loving children, Maura’s first picture book, The Trouble in Tune Town, won the 2018 ACT Writing and Publishing Awards and several overseas honours. Her children’s poems have been published in The Caterpillar and various anthologies, and her essays, memoir and poetry appear in Cicerone Journal and anthologies including These Tiny Threads Remind Me (The Written in the Time of COVID-19 Anthology) and Branch & Root (The Anthology of the Trees).

The recipient of several writing fellowships, residencies and awards, Maura is a regular reviewer for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s online magazine, Reading Time and a Sponsor and Role Model for Books in Homes Australia. In 2022, she founded The Book Bench Project, a Canberra initiative that fosters a shared love of reading and sense of community. 

Drawn at an early age to big ideas, Maura has a PhD in philosophy. She has worked as an ethicist, editor of Australian Medicine, medical writer/producer and business owner. Besides writing full-time, Maura visits schools and libraries as a guest reader and speaker. She is also a Role Model, Sponsor and volunteer grant writer for Books in Homes Australia. She has two non-fiction children’s titles coming out in 2023 (Storytorch Press) and 2024 (Affirm Press).

When she’s not busy thinking, dreaming, laughing or creating – and sometimes even when she is – Maura enjoys spending time with her family at their avocado farm set within a coastal NSW rainforest, a mountaintop property they share with wombats, echidnas, lyrebirds, kangaroos and two energetic Bordoodle pups.

To learn more about Maura’s work, check out ‘Works’ on this website,

or view her Writer’s CV and list of Publications and Awards.