Jennifer Down is a writer, editor and translator. Her critically acclaimed first novel Our Magic Hour was published in 2016, followed by a short story collection, Pulse Points, in 2017. Pulse Points received the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and the Queensland Literary Award for Short Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Lifted Brow, the Australian Book Review, Lithub, The Stinging Fly (Ireland) and Blue Mesa Review (New Mexico). In both 2017 and 2018 she was named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year. She is interested in the intersections between gender, class, and geography. Her new novel, Bodies of Light, is scheduled to be published by Text in 2020.
During her time at MacDowell, she worked on Bodies of Light's copyedits. The book went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award and be shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, the Stella Prize, the Age Fiction Book of the Year, the ASA Barbara Jefferis Award, and the Voss Prize.
