I’m an Australian writer, editor, publisher and researcher, living between Melbourne and Athens, Greece. My fiction, criticism, essays and journalism have been published and anthologised in places like: Overland, Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing Anthology 2020, Sydney Review of Books, Island, Best Australian Short Stories, Australian Book Review, Slow Canoe, The Newcastle Short Story Anthology, Kill Your Darlings, The Australian, The Lifted Brow, The Sydney Morning Herald, Fireflies, The Age, The Guardian, Meanjin, Antithesis and Vice.

In 2021, I was the recipient of an Australia Council Grant to develop the manuscript for my first novel In Real Life. I was also long-listed for both The Commonwealth Writers Story Prize 2021 and the 2021 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Award.

In 2020, I won the bi-annual Alan Marshall Short Story Award 2020, for ‘Show Don’t Tell’; in 2019 I placed third in the Newcastle Short Story Award, for ‘Small Acts of Love and Devotion’. I was a 2018 Felix Meyer Scholar, travelling to Kenya for the Summer Literary Seminar, studying under the American essayist Lynne Tillman. In 2017 I was runner-up in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, for ‘The Leaching Layer’, and was highly commended in 2016 for ‘Help Me Harden My Heart’, a story which was subsequently anthologised in the final edition of Best Australian Stories. I was a 2016 RG Wilson Scholar, after getting the best Honours mark in the Humanities department of the University of Melbourne.

Since 2019, I’ve been a PhD candidate at the University of RMIT, and am working on a novel called In Real Life.

You can reach me at: domamerena@gmail.com