Emma
Tom

Speaker Profile

Emma Tom is an award-winning Sydney writer and broadcaster who has spent the past 20 years working in all aspects of the print and electronic media. She makes regular appearances on TV and radio, her column appears in The Australian each Saturday and she freelances widely for magazines and newspapers both in Australia and overseas. Emma Tom is the author of six books including Deadset, a novel which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Asia and the South Pacific for Best First Novel. Her sixth book, an emotional survival guide to pregnancy called Attack of the Fifty Foot Hormones, was published by HarperCollins in July 2009.

Emma, who served for five years on the Advertising Standards Board, has received a number of awards for her journalism including, in June 2001, the Edna Ryan Humour Award for 'using wit to promote women's interests'. This followed her receipt of the 1997 Henry Lawson Award for Journalism which was awarded for a story on do-it-yourself funerals. Two of her journalistic enterprises made appearances in the 1997 Carlton and United book of Best Australian Sports Writing and Photography.

Emma lectures and tutors in media studies at a number of Sydney universities and is currently a full time student at the University of New South Wales where she is very slowly and painfully completing a PhD. She used to play very loud rock music in a number of very loud rock bands but now – thanks to the arrival of a magnificent daughter – her repertoire has become distinctly Play School-esque. In fact if the organisers of the Big Day Out ever need a frazzled mum to sing a slightly off key rendition of The Wheels on The Bus while screaming 'USE YOUR INSIDE VOICE!', she is definitely their woman.

Travels from New South Wales