Richard Yaxley has written novels for adults and young adults, plays, poetry and contributed to many textbooks.

His first novel, The Rose Leopard, was published by University of Queensland Press in 2003. Drink The Air, a verse novel, won the 2010 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction, and Joyous and Moonbeam (Omnibus 2013) was shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction.

Other novels include Bloodlines (Strictly Literary 2009) and Spring Rain (2014), both of which were published on-line.

He has written or co-written over twenty books for the classroom, including two collections of short stories and a collection of plays, and has been a recipient of an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board Grant and, in 2011, a Medal in the Order of Australia (OAM) for services to education, literature and performing arts.

In April 2015 he completed a May Gibbs Trust Creative Writing Fellowship in Canberra, the result of which was a novel for young adults entitled This Is My Song, to be published by Scholastic early in 2017.

Richard was also the 2016 recipient of the Walter Stone Award for Life Writing (FAW NSW) for Homecoming, a narrative memoir of his great-uncle who landed at Gallipoli on April 25th, 2015. Richard lives in Brisbane, Australia.