Shane
Maloney

Speaker Profile

Shane Maloney is one of Australia's most popular novelists and a winner of the prestigious Ned Kelly Prize for Crime Fiction. His Murray Whelan series of comic thrillers - Stiff, The Brush-Off, Nice Try, The Big Ask and Something Fishy - is characterised by compelling plots, a strong sense of humour, an acute ear for the Australian idiom and one of the most unlikely protagonists in contemporary crime fiction.

Translations of the Murray Whelan books have been published in Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Finland and the U.S. Two of the books, Stiff and The Brush-Off, have been produced as movies starring David Wenham in the title role. They were broadcast on the Seven Network in 2004 (Stiff was Seven's highest rating Sunday evening movie for the year). Adapted for the screen by John Clarke and directed by Clarke and Sam Neill, they are now available on DVD.
His novels have been well received by other crime-writers and Kerry Greenwood has said of Shane: 'He's got an ingenious, very Australian wit which is very verbal and a very strong sense of the ridiculous'. Crime fiction critic Stuart Coupe claimed 'He's a little bit different from most Australian crime fiction writers in that he is humorous. Most of them are a bit serious. He's nailed down the vernacular of Melbourne in a particular era.'

As well as his crime fiction, Maloney has published many articles and columns in Arena Magazine, The Melbourne Weekly, The Canberra Times, Eureka Street and The Age.

A long time resident of Brunswick, Shane has held many different posts before ruining his future employment prospects by becoming a full-time writer. As well as discussing his written work, Shane can also describe his past lives! He was Director of the Melbourne Comedy Festival for its first three years, Cultural Director of Melbourne's Olympic bid, a qualified swimming pool lifeguard, a rock concert promoter for 3RRR, a senior arts bureaucrat and a contestant on Sale of the Century. A source from The Age suggested that his vast web of contacts from these previous jobs provides the personalities and scenarios for his novels.

Shane is an entertaining public speaker who has been a featured guest at all major writers festivals in Australia as well as such pretigious international festivals as Vancouver, Hay-on-Wye and Bouchercon USA. One of his books was a text for the Victorian Certificate of Education and he was recently appointed an Honorary Visiting Fellow at La Trobe University - an extraordinarily rare distinction for a writer of crime fiction.

Travels from Victoria