About
Saskia Beudel is a writer of fiction and non-fiction.
Her fourth book Peaking: One Hundred and Eleven Days on Two Wheels is due for release in May 2026.
She is the author of non-fiction works A Country in Mind: Memoir with Landscape and (with Jill Bennett) Curating Sydney, and the novel Borrowed Eyes. Her books have been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, a Dobbie Award and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.
Her essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Best Australian Essays, The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, HEAT and The Iowa Review, among others.
Her scholarly articles are published in international collections Expeditionary Anthropology (Berghahn), Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (Routledge) and Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (Onomatopee).
She has held several research fellowships including at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society in Munich, and at the University of Edinburgh.
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‘What a riveting and illuminating book! Peaking moves with agile grace between memoir, history, art and the natural world in this far-reaching meditation on testing the body. It’s brilliant on exhilaration and fear – and everything else Saskia Beudel encounters along her way.’ Michelle de Kretser
‘A Country in Mind defies the conservative view, the taxonomical thundering, and all other attempts at generic border protection.’ Kerryn Goldsworthy Sydney Review of Books
‘Books such as … Saskia Beudel’s walking memoir, A Country in Mind, are sceptical of any Romantic sense of boundless plenty and adept … at negotiating the rough terrain of broken country … each is tuned, as Beudel puts it beautifully, to the “off-key tone of colonised land”. One of the great strengths of such recent Australian writing is that it is never just about the present, but works its way back into the past to make us think hard about what we think we already know; and it gives us a more complex set of tools to think about the future.’ Delia Falconer