About Me

My name is Penny Garnsworthy and I love to write!

I won my first award for fiction writing at the age of nine with a children’s fantasy story entitled The Magic Circle. At fourteen my first non-fiction article was published; a first- hand account of a bus breakdown at a Sunday School picnic.

But it wasn’t until the early 1990s I began to take my writing seriously. I took creative writing classes and wrote lots of short stories for adults. Many of these have won awards, been published commercially and presented on national radio. In 2004 a collection of my short stories was published in the UK under the title Recoil! because of their surprise endings.

I finally discovered the joy of writing for children and my first children’s book, The Lighthouse Secret was published in 2003 by Word Weavers Press as part of their ‘Quick Reads’ series. I self published Across the Line in 2006 and The Cyber Riddles in 2007. Both books appear on the Premier’s Reading Challenge in NSW.

For many years now I have researched and written non-fiction educational articles for Australia’s two leading school magazines. And in 2011 I uploaded Jessie’s Ghosts, my first Kindle e-book for children, to amazon.com. I have also given the e-book to an e-distributor and it is available to purchase from my website.

I live in the beautiful Tamar Valley in Northern Tasmania and share my life with partner Jim, pademelons, rabbits and wallabies. For me, reading is second only to writing and I love sci-fi, fantasy, crime and mystery novels … and of course books for kids!