Photo: Cathy Breen (@cbr_photographer)

Maura Pierlot

Maura is an author, playwright and filmmaker based in Canberra. Her work across art forms explores the complex intersection between identity, self and belonging. Tackling youth mental health themes, Maura’s acclaimed play, Fragments, is now an award-winning web series, supported by the ACT Government, a feature-length anthology film and a hybrid young adult novella. 

Maura enjoys writing creative non-fiction for children. Alphabetter – Better Ways to Be from A to Z (Affirm Press, February 2024), presents fun, relatable scenarios that encourage children to explore positive character traits and values. What Will You Make Today? (Storytorch Press, June 2023) empowers young readers to make a difference in the world.

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 appear in The Caterpillar, The School Magazine and various anthologies. Her essays, short stories and poetry have been published in Cicerone Journal, These Tiny Threads Remind Me (The Written in the Time of COVID-19 Anthology) and Branch & Root (The Anthology of the Trees).

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 the founder of The Book Bench Project, a Canberra initiative that fosters a shared love of reading and sense of community. She is also a regular reviewer for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s online magazine, Reading Time and a Role Model and Sponsor for Books in Homes Australia.

When she’s not busy thinking, dreaming and 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 Bordoodles.

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.