About

 SASKIA BEUDEL is a writer and critic. She first trained as a visual artist, and writes across a number of genres.

In 2022 she was awarded a Copyright Agency Fellowship for Non-Fiction Writing to complete her fourth book. Saskia is the author of A Country in Mind and Curating Sydney (with Jill Bennett), 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, reviews and scholarly articles are published nationally and internationally.

Her critical work appears in The Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review, ABR Arts, Sydney Review of Books, Artist Profile, Kill Your Darlings and Artlink. Her scholarly articles are published internationally in edited collections Expeditionary Anthropology (Berghahn), Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (Routledge) and Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (Onomatopee, forthcoming 2022).

She held a University of Sydney Fellowship at Sydney College of the Arts (2013–2016) and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at UNSW Art & Design (2011–2013). In 2016 she was a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society in Munich (a joint initiative of the Ludwig Maximilians University and the Deutsche Museum); and in 2018 she held an Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.

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 Bruce Pascoe’s galvanising Dark Emu, Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful and 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, ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Sydney Review of Books

Beudel, a fabulous storyteller, has [created] a novel of exceptional knowledge and intelligence.

—    Jenny Digby, Australian Book Review