BIOGRAPHY

Marie-Claire Colyer is a literary fiction writer, poet, graphic designer and award-winning wildlife artist.

With artworks hung in private collections and several art awards to her name, she has been exhibited in shows in Australia and overseas. Her work is licensed internationally for calendars and décor.

Marie-Claire's artwork and writing have been published in magazines, journals and newspapers both in print internationally and online. Her poetry was shortlisted and longlisted for two prizes in the 2016 Lane Cove Literary Awards. Her work has appeared in Lane Cove Literary Awards 2016: An Anthology, Mascara Literary Review, Authora Australis Literary Journal, Independent Australia, Utilities Magazine and Coromandel Life Magazine.

Influenced by a childhood divided between Sydney and a vineyard in the Upper Hunter Valley, engagement with nature forged her desire to depict and describe wildlife. This she has faithfully been doing since first beginning to draw and write as a young child. Self-taught, it is through dedicated practice that Marie-Claire Colyer has learned to write and to illustrate wildlife. And it is a subject matter that will remain close to her heart.

To quote Fiona Edmonds-Dobrijevich, (lecturer and artist), ‘Her precocious talent for realist drawing was evident at a young age, but she has sustained this focus and skill within her art practice throughout her adult life… Her spectacular photorealistic drawings are detailed, layered and textural, giving a real sense of the threatened species she depicts.'

She can often be found at three in the morning dashing down words that won’t let her rest till captured; or dripping wet scribbling on a scrap of paper when the muse distracts her from a shower. Her family well know the creativity that leaves the washing up half-done and the coloured pencils vying for space with the stack of handwritten notes on her desk.

She lives in Wahroonga, Sydney with her partner and seventeen-year-old son, along with flocks of wild king parrots and crimson rosellas that come to feed on wild olives in her garden. And one bold male parrot that has adopted them and visits daily.

Embers of Drought

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