About me

Short and sweet and 3rd person…
Louise Pieper is a reader, a writer, a librarian and a lexophile. She is passionate about great stories which deliver on their promise to the reader. She has variously been told she wears too much black, laughs too loudly, has too many books and reads too much, but she doesn’t believe any of that is possible. She does believe books can change the world, one reader at a time. She writes and teaches creative writing in Canberra. Her dream job is to be the writer in residence somewhere with comfortable chairs and good coffee.

Something a little longer and 1st person…
Humanity is hard-wired for stories.
And some of us can’t stop telling them.
I started telling stories when I was a child, growing up in Brisbane, Australia.
I kept on telling them all through school and university – pouring them into the enormously fun, collective story-telling process of role-playing games.
For years, I would write pieces of stories into notebooks and tuck them away in drawers.
When I travelled, and when I lived in London and Peterborough and Edinburgh and Glasgow, stories seeped out of the stones, where they’d accrued over time, and suggested themselves to me.
I’ve always loved stories and they have shaped my life.
I chose my first undergraduate degree because I loved John Mortimer’s books and thought that I’d make an excellent Rumpole of the Bailey. Unfortunately, while there are many, many books involved in the law, they tend to be a little dry for my taste.
Becoming a librarian, though – that was a much better idea. Working at Gold Coast Libraries, I was surrounded by stories, and it was my job to recommend them to others. I also had the chance to meet, be inspired by, and learn from amazing authors and storytellers.
Since moving south to Canberra, I’ve spent most of my time writing the stories I’ve always wanted to tell. I’m working on getting a novel published. My short stories have been published in the Heroines Anthologies 1, 2 and 3 (Neo Perennial Press), A Hand of Knaves and Unnatural Order (CSFG Publishing), and Good Southern Witches (Curious Blue Press, 2021).

My Unnatural Order short story, Truth Be Told, won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story published in Australia in 2020.