Heather Rose

Heather Rose (born 1964 in Hobart, Australia) is an Australian author and entrepreneur. Her novels include White Heart, The Butterfly Man, The River Wife, Finding Serendipity and A Week Without Tuesday. Her career has spanned advertising, business, the arts and writing. She is one of Tasmania's best known authors and businesswomen.^[1]

Background

Heather Rose was born in Hobart, Tasmania. By the age of sixteen she had a weekly column in the Hobart Mercury. She won the Tasmanian Short Story Prize in 1981. She left school in 1982 and traveled widely though Asia and Europe.^[2] Returning to Australia in 1984 she became an advertising copywriter in Melbourne.

In 1996 she returned to Tasmania with her husband Creative Director and musician Rowan Smith.

In 1999 Smith and Rose co-founded an advertising agency, Coo'ee Tasmania, a member of the international Coo’ee Network across Europe, Australasia and the USA with Smith as Creative Director and Rose as Managing Director.^[3] Growth of Coo’ee and the success of its campaigns led to Rose being named Telstra Tasmanian Business Woman of the Year 2004.^[4]

Rose became Chairman of the Coo'ee Network of agencies across Australasia from 2005 - 2007. In 2007 Coo'ee Tasmania left the Coo’ee Network and partnered with Green Team Global in New York.^[5] Green Team Australia became Australia's first green advertising agency.^[6] Green Team Australia has won over 25 international creative awards.

In 2008 Heather was appointed Chairman of the Festival of Voices,^[7] a Hobart-based arts festival celebrating song, music and the voice. From 2008 – 2011 Rose, as Chairman, built the Festival into one of the state’s leading annual Festivals.^[8]

The Festival and Green Team Australia received the Tasmanian 2010 Australian Business Arts Foundation (ABAF) Award for SME's through a partnership created by Rose.^[9]

In 2011 Rose was awarded the national ABAF Woodside Better Business Award for her extensive philanthropic contribution to Festival of Voices establishing it as a leading Australian Festival.^[10]

Rose is a Mentor in the Tasmanian Leaders Program training business people in leadership excellence.^[11]

Rose is a founding Board member of the Macquarie Point Development Corporation.^[12][13]

Books

Heather Rose is the author of five published novels for both adults and children. Her first adult novel White Heart was published in 1999 by Transworld. It tells the story of two children growing up in Tasmania. One of them becomes involved in the Native American ritual of sun dancing and the other becomes a Tasmanian tiger hunter. Murray Waldren in The Australian said: "Spirituality permeates Heather Rose's first novel, White Heart, as much as the past haunts it. This story is a complex of interwoven, sometimes chimeric themes...A-class debut."^[14]

Rose's second novel, The Butterfly Man, was published by UQP in 2005,^[15] It recounts the story of Lord Lucan the British Peer who disappeared from his family home in London after the murder of the family nanny in 1974. The Butterfly Man won the Davitt Award for Crime Fiction Novel of the Year in 2006^[16] and was shortlisted for the Nita B Kibble Award.^[17] It was also longlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2007.^[18]

Heather Rose is a recipient of the prestigious international Eleanor Dark Fellowship^[19] in 2007 for her then unpublished manuscript of The River Wife.

The River Wife was published in 2009 by Allen & Unwin and described as "a beautiful, modern fable about the price we pay for love – a magical and original novel".^[20] It has received significant acclaim from reviewers and readers where it has been hailed for the beauty of its storytelling.^[21] An abridged version of The River Wife was broadcast on Radio National in 2010.^[22]

Rose has said of her first three novels: "I am passionately Tasmanian and my family has lived here many generations. I think of this book as the third in a trilogy of books that dives into the Tasmanian landscape. The first – White Heart – is a sweeping view of the island told through the lens of childhood. The second – The Butterfly Man – dives closer into the seasons and landscape of Mt Wellington, the mountain that is the backdrop to Hobart. And The River Wife dives even more deeply into the central highlands, the very heart of Tasmania, and finds there a story, a myth, a fable that is uniquely Tasmanian. Perhaps it is no surprise that is it also a love story.^[23]

In 2013 Rose published her first children’s novel Finding Serendipity co-authored with fellow award-winning writer Danielle Wood under the pen name Angelica Banks and published in Australia by Allen & Unwin.^[24][25]

Finding Serendipity, the first in the Tuesday McGillycuddy series, has also been published in Germany by Magellan^[26] and in the USA with Henry Holt (MacMIllan).^[27][28]

The second book in the Tuesday McGillycuddy series - A Week Without Tuesday was published in Australian in 2015^[29] and will be published in Germany late 2015 and the USA in 2016.

Rose has also been published in several collections including Some Girls Do edited by Jacinta Tynan (2007), Mosaic (2008) edited by Rosalind Bradley and Dirty Words: A Literary Dictionary of Sex (2008 – USA) terms edited by Ellen Sussman. ^[30]

Other publications include a number of Island magazines – for both fiction, non-fiction and reviews.^[31] and publications on art including Art & Australia^[32] and Art Monthly.^[33]

She is currently working on the third book in the Tuesday MCgillycuddy series and a new novel based on the life of performance artist Marina Abramović.^[34]

References

External links

• Official website
• Green Team Global
• Festival of Voices
• SmithAssociates