Francesca Haig

Francesca Haig is an Australian author and academic, raised in Tasmania and now based in Melbourne. She holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and has worked as a senior lecturer and Visiting Writing Fellow at the University of Chester. Her poetry has appeared widely in Australian and British journals, collected in Bodies of Water (2006), and she received a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2010. Haig is best known for the post-apocalyptic Fire Sermon trilogy — The Fire Sermon (2015), The Map of Bones (2016), and The Forever Ship (2017) — set in a divided world where every person is born with a twin, one whole and one disabled. Writing historical fiction as Francesca de Tores, she later authored the bestselling Saltblood (2024), winner of the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.