Melina Marchetta
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| Melina Marchetta | |
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| Born | 1965 Sydney |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Genres | Young adult fiction |
| Notable work(s) | Looking For Alibrandi |
| Notable award(s) | CBCA Award |
Melina Marchetta (born 1965) is an Australian writer and teacher. She is best known as the author of Looking For Alibrandi. She has twice been awarded the CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers, in 1993 and 2004.[1]
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[edit] Biography
Melina Marchetta was born in Sydney in 1965.[2] She left school at age fifteen as she was not confident in her academic ability. She then enrolled in a business school where she gained useful office skills, such as typing which helped her gain employment at a major Australian bank and later at a travel agency where she worked as a consultant. This work gave her confidence to return to school and gain a teaching degree. She then got a job teaching at Saint Mary's College in the heart of the Sydney CBD until 2006. [3]
[edit] Novels
[edit] Looking For Alibrandi
"And what's this about you and your friends driving around Bondi Junction half-dressed last week?" "Who told you that?" "Signora Formosa saw you. She said you and your friends almost ran over her. She rang Zia Patrizia's next-door neighbor and it got back to Nonna." Telecom would go broke if it weren't for the Italians.
Josephine Alibrandi is seventeen, illegitimate, and in her final year at a wealthy Catholic school. This is the year her father comes back into her life, the year she falls in love, the year she discovers the secrets of her family's past and the year she sets herself free.
I'll run one day. Run for my life. To be free and think for myself. Not as an Australian and not as an Italian and not as an in-between. I'll run to be emancipated.
[edit] Saving Francesca
My old school, St Stella's, only goes to Year Ten and most of my friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn't allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn't bring me up to have limitations placed upon me. If you know my mother you'll sense there's an irony there, based on the fact that she is the Queen of Limitation Placers in my life.
Francesca is at the beginning of her second term in Year Eleven at an all boys school that has just started accepting girls. She still misses her old friends, and, to make things worse, her mother has had a breakdown and can barely move from her bed. But Francesca had not counted on the fierce loyalty of her new friends, or falling in love, or finding that it is within her power to bring her family back together.
[edit] On The Jellicoe Road
I'm dreaming of the boy in the tree. I tell him stories. About the Jellicoe School and the Townies and the Cadets from a school in Sydney. I tell him about the war between us for territory. And I tell him about Hannah, who lives in the unfinished house by the river. Hannah, who is too young to be hiding away from the world. Hannah, who found me on the Jellicoe Road six years ago.
Taylor is leader of the boarders at the Jellicoe School. She has to keep the upper hand in the territory wars and deal with Jonah Griggs - the enigmatic leader of the cadets, and someone she thought she would never see again. And now Hannah, the person Taylor had come to rely on, has disappeared. Taylor's only clue is a manuscript about five kids who lived in Jellicoe eighteen years ago. She needs to find out more, but this means confronting her own story, making sense of her strange, recurring dream, and finding her mother - who abandoned her on the Jellicoe Road.
[edit] Screenplay
Melina Marchetta wrote the screenplay for the film Looking For Alibrandi (2000), a major motion picture starring Pia Miranda, Greta Scacchi and Anthony La Paglia. The film received rave reviews and was a huge box office success, winning five awards including an AFI award and an Independent Film Award for best screenplay, as well as the NSW Premier's Literary Award and the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award.[4]
[edit] Bibliography
- Looking For Alibrandi (1992)
- Looking For Alibrandi Screenplay (2000)
- Saving Francesca (2003)
- On The Jellicoe Road (2006)
- Finnikin of the Rock (due mid 2008)[5]
