Lia Hills is an award-winning poet, novelist and translator, born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has been published, translated and performed around the world.

Her debut novel, The Beginner’s Guide to Living (Text, 2009), was critically acclaimed both in Australia and overseas, and was shortlisted for the Victorian, Queensland and Western Australian Premiers’ Literary Awards, and the NZ Post Book Awards. It was translated and sold into numerous countries, including Germany, Brazil, Greece and the US (Farrer, Straus & Giroux).

Lia’s translation of Marie Darrieussecq’s acclaimed novel, Tom is Dead (Text, 2009), from French to English, was described as ‘a text as powerful as the original’ (The Monthly). Following its successful reception, Lia was asked to teach a double-Masters course in literary translation at Monash University, a joint venture with Jean Moulin University (Lyon).

Upon the release of her first poetry collection, the possibility of flight (IP, 2008), both the collection and individual poems garnered awards. Her work as poet also includes the widely-praised Moving Galleries, a poetry/art project on Melbourne’s train network. Co-initiator, Lia worked with the project from its inception, and was appointed director when the project became an independent entity in 2011.

Lia’s most recent novel, The Crying Place (Allen and Unwin, 2017), was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2018 and named Book of the Month by Australian Independent Booksellers. Recipient of a Creative Victoria grant for her work on the novel, Lia travelled regularly to the centre of Australia to research and write The Crying Place, set partly in Pitjantjatjara country. As part of the process, Lia stayed in Aboriginal communities and began learning the Pitjantjatjara language.

In 2019, Lia received a Creative Victoria Creators Fund grant to work on her forthcoming novel, The Desert Knows Her Name (Affirm Press, 2024). Set in the Wimmera, it is the story of a young girl who walks barefoot out of the desert, and the response to her emergence in the local community and beyond. The novel explores the erasure and re-emergence of voices, both human and nonhuman, and the silences that persist in contemporary Australia. The first draft was narrated, using voice-recognition software, over a two-week period in an abandoned farmhouse on the edge of the desert. During the writing of The Desert Knows Her Name, Lia engaged regularly with the Barengi Gadgin Land Council, the representative body of the traditional custodians of the Country on which the novel is set, their feedback and knowledge-sharing vital to creation of the work.

Lia is the curator of Writing ngurrak barring, a cultural walk being created across the Dandenong Ranges, which incorporates a strong focus on First Nations stories and knowledges. She is also completing her first book-length work of nonfiction, as part of her doctoral thesis at Deakin University (‘Writing stolen land: creative practice as a decolonising process’).

Lia lives with her family in the hills outside Naarm/Melbourne on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people.