Bill Wilkie is a writer with an ambitious vision to tell some of far north Queensland’s more recent and dramatic history. His first book, The Daintree Blockade, won the Premier’s Award for Work of State Significance at the Queensland Literary Awards in 2017. He lives in far north Queensland with his partner and two daughters. He loves to create immensely readable accounts of the big untold stories.

In 2018 Bill received a Griffith Review Queensland Writing Fellowship. He has undertaken writing residencies at KSP Writers’ Centre in Perth and Varuna: the National Writers’ House in Katoomba, and in 2015 he was accepted into the ACT Writers Centre’s Hardcopy manuscript program.

Bill’s writing has been published in QWeekend, Saturday Paper, Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, Writing Queensland, Ecotone and Newsport. His writing interests include Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen years, the Australian counter-culture of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the environment, and current Queensland politics. Bill’s research has taken him from the National Library of Australia in Canberra to remote hippie camps in isolated tropical rainforests.

Bill studied sociology and Australian history at the University of Queensland, and has a Graduate Diploma in Knowledge Management (University of Technology, Sydney). He has lived in London, Dublin and Sydney, and travelled throughout Europe, Asia and South America.

Bill is currently researching his next nonfiction book, Cedar Bay: Australia’s hippie hideaway, a history of the hippie community that resided at Cedar Bay, near Cooktown, during the 1970s. In 2018, this project was awarded a Griffith Review Varuna Writers Residency and a Griffith Review Writing Fellowship.