why?
Anything by Penelope Fitzgerald, but especially The Blue Flower because she is a marvelous writer who is scarcely known in Australia.

If you could choose one new writer to be "discovered," who would it be?
Joan London, author of Gilgamesh -- a wonderful Australian fiction writer whose work is not widely known outside Australia.

What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
Keep reading. Keep writing.

Author Essay
In Crime Time magazine, de Kretser discussed some early influences which led her to write The Hamilton Case.

I grew up in Ceylon in the 1960s, a time and place when murder was in the air. Not the ethnic violence, the large-scale public murders with their numbing statistics that would later become synonymous with Sri Lanka, but intimate, claustrophobic tragedies reportedby the press in tones of scandalised righteousness. A goaded servant seized a bread-knife and slit his master's throat. A diplomat's Eurasian mistress was shot in the chest as she stumbled down an embassy staircase, pleading for mercy. A doctor kept his wife prisoner in a back bedroom where he poisoned her by degrees, some said with the connivance of his teenage daughters. That last murderer was the creepiest: a doctor who brought death, not healing. Here true crime conformed to the golden principle of detective fiction: that guilt lies with the least likely suspect.

By my eighth birthday I had begun reading the Agatha Christie novels that lay piled on our bookshelves. Books like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Crooked House introduced me to the intellectual pleasure