Parting Words/The Secrets at Ocean's Edge

Cass Moriarty’s debut novel The Promise Seed, published by University of Queensland Press in 2015, was longlisted for the 2017 Dublin International Literary Award, and shortlisted for both the 2016 Queensland Literary Awards (Courier-Mail People’s Choice Award) and the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards (Emerging Author category). Her second novel Parting Words was released by University of Queensland Press in August 2017. Both novels explore the silences and secrets in families, and both feature themes of betrayal, loyalty, loss, grief and forgiveness.

In September 2017 Cass received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts towards her third novel. Her writing has been published regularly in The Saturday Paper over the last 12 months. She is a writing mentor, including through the Queensland Writers Centre (QWC) Writer’s Surgery program. She has presented writing workshops through the QWC and Brisbane City Council Libraries. Cass has a Bachelor of Communications degree from Queensland University of Technology and has worked in marketing and public relations.

She lives in Brisbane and has six children.

Determined to be a writer since early childhood, Kali enrolled in a creative writing degree at Curtin University at age 16, but dropped out for a lack of ‘life experience’. For 22 years, life experience got in the way of writing her own stories. Instead, in Bangladesh, she documented the impact of development interventions on women’s lives, and, on Yamatji country in Western Australia, she listened to Native Title claimants’ stories to draft connection reports.

Moving to Queensland, Kali worked as a family history researcher for the Community and Personal Histories Unit of the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Multicultural Affairs. Here, she became a storyteller, piecing together multigenerational family sagas full of secrets, trauma, and loss, from fragments in the archives.   In 2013, she returned to creative writing. Her first manuscript was selected in the QWC/ Hachette Australia Manuscript Development Program in 2015.

In 2016, two of her manuscripts were longlisted in the Bath Novel Award in 2016. The second manuscript was contracted by Hachette Australia, and released as The Secrets at Ocean’s Edge in January 2018. She is currently an MPhil candidate in Creative Writing at The University of Queensland, exploring the poetics of dress in historical fiction.