Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels Salvage (Picador, 2025) The Airways (Picador, 2021), Dyschronia (Picador, 2018), Gone (UQP, 2011) and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight (UQP, 2012). In 2019 Dyschronia was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most prestigious prize for literary fiction, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and the Aurealis Awards for science fiction. In 2022, The Airways was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards for horror.

The Rest is Weight was shortlisted for the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards Steele Rudd Award for an Australian Short Story Collection and longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In 2012 Mills was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist and in 2014 she received the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship from the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Previous awards include the 2008 Marian Eldridge Award for Young Emerging Women Writers, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and the Northern Territory Literary Awards.

Mills’ fiction, essays and criticism have been widely published, including in Australian Book Review, Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Essays, Griffith Review, The Guardian, Heat, Island, Lithub, Meanjin, The Monthly, New Australian Stories, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, The Saturday Paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Review of Books, and The Washington Post. Mills’ creative residencies include time at Varuna and Bundanon, an Asialink residency in Beijing in 2010, and a residency at Yaddo in NY in 2015. She was the fiction editor at Overland literary journal from 2012-2018. In 2022, Mills was Artist in Residence at Vitalstatistix. She was recently awarded an SA Literary Fellowship for 2025.

A passionate advocate for better working conditions for artists and writers, Mills is active in MEAA freelance campaigns and is currently Deputy Chair of the Australian Society of Authors.

Mills’ story, ‘The Childhood of the World,’ was commissioned by Slingsby for the triptych A Concise Compendium of Wonder which will premiere at the Adelaide Festival in 2026.

Mills lives on Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide). She is represented by Martin Shaw.

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