Jennifer Down is an author from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her most recent novel, Bodies of Light, received the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize; and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Age Book of the Year Award. It has been translated into Spanish, German, Polish, and Catalan. Down was named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year in both 2017 and 2018 for her debut novel Our Magic Hour and short fiction collection Pulse Points respectively.
She has undertaken residency programs at Banff Centre for the Arts (2025, 2018), Montello Foundation (2025), Yefe Nof (2024), and Vermont Studio Center (2016). In 2024, she was awarded a Lockie Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. Day-to-day, she works as a freelance copywriter and editor. She also publishes an irregular Substack newsletter called BAD DOG on caregiving, daughtering, haunting, abjection, and childhood.
At MacDowell in 2019, Down worked towards completing the first draft of Bodies of Light.
