Emma Sloley began her career as an editor at Harper's BAZAAR Australia before moving to New York to become a freelance travel writer. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in literary journals such as Catapult, Literary Hub, The Common, Joyland, and The Masters Review Anthology.Her short story, “The Blood Recluse,” was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s award and long listed for the Disquiet International Writers Prize and the International Literary Seminar Fiction Contest, both in 2022. Her short story, “Sugartown,” was shortlisted for the 2023 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the 2022 Bridport Prize. Her travel writing has been published in Travel + Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Departures, Coastal Living, Gourmet Traveller, Virtuoso Life, and New York magazine, among many others.
Sloley is a MacDowell Fellow and in 2021 received a Rona Jaffe Foundation scholarship to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference. Her debut novel, Disaster’s Children, which she worked on during her 2014 MacDowell residency, was published by Little A Books in 2019. Her second novel, The Island of Last Things, was published by Flatiron books in 2025.
