Memorable people and places, chance moments, and inspiring works of art find their way into the words writers produce. Authors of all stages can pinpoint things that have altered the course of their creative lives. They can often say, ‘That was where it changed for me.’
In this series, we invite authors across Australia to reflect on three turning points that have shaped them, offering us glimpses into how each writer was made.
Today we welcome multi-award-winning author Toni Jordan. Toni is originally from Brisbane and her dazzling new novel, Tenderfoot, is inspired by her life as the daughter of greyhound trainers, growing up in Morningside. Toni's publishing history includes 7 books – her first was Addition, recently adapted into a film starring Teresa Palmer and Joe Dempsie. Toni's journey to become an author was not a straight path and started with a chance encounter in a university mailroom.
While her mother sat in the car at Carina library "listening to the trots on the radio", Toni says she and her sister loved going inside to choose their books for the fortnight ahead (via ABC Radio National's The Book Show).
A person
It's 1985 and I'm unemployed and I'm sleeping on the floor on my boyfriend's brother's flat and I'm becoming desperate. My possessions are 2 garbage bags of clothes, a saucepan and a pillowslip. I have no source of income and no skills other than typing. I apply for job after job, as a receptionist mostly, without ever getting an interview. I spend every day reading novels. I'm 18 years old and I feel that everything is useless, that I am useless.
Then miraculously, I do get an interview. It's working in the mailroom for a busy laboratory at the University of Queensland. I dread to remember that interview because, looking back, I was likely dishevelled, definitely spacey. Lost in hopelessness. The person interviewing me is the laboratory manager, a young doctoral student named Scott. I can only imagine how bad the other candidates were because incredibly, he hires me.
After only a few weeks' work, Scott has an idea. I could enrol part-time in a bachelor of science degree, he tells me. I could attend lectures during the day and work back to make up the hours at night.
I do this.
At the end of the following year, one of the scientists resigns. I'm only part-way through my degree but astonishingly, Scott promotes me. For the next four years I learn about protein chemistry from the ground up, like an apprenticeship. I have my own bench, my own work. I love it more than I can say. By the time I finally graduate, Scott and his wife have become two of my best friends. I owe him more than I can say – especially now that I'm working on a novel about the life of a famous twentieth-century scientist.
We love this glimpse into a science lab at UQ in 1985 (including the polystyrene esky under the desk).
A place
It's 2004, and I'm sitting on a plane half-way between Kuala Lumpur and home. I'm tired. It's been a busy trip. I left bench research almost eight years ago and now I'm a technical writer for pharmaceutical and biotech firms, writing drug dossiers and new chemical entity reports for regulatory bodies in Australia and South East Asia. I love writing, I've discovered. In fact, I'm in the first year of a TAFE course in which almost every subject is relevant to my work in scientific writing. Almost every subject. I've also enrolled in one creative subject, in this course. It's called 'Writing a novel', and enrolling in it was my husband's idea. 'Your favourite thing in the world is reading novels,' he said, when I was filling in the form. 'Why don't you do one creative subject, just for the fun of it?'
I do this.
Now, sitting on the plane, I've finished all my real, paid work and I'm up to date with my course work. But, for some inexplicable reason, an idea pops into my head. It's a vivid idea for a story about a woman who counts things. The first few pages are here already, being written inside my head.
It's the middle of the night. I'm tired. But I have an aisle seat, and my laptop is in my overhead compartment. I stand up, take out my bag. I start work on what will become Addition, my first novel, on that plane.
'Your favourite thing in the world is reading novels,' he said, when I was filling in the form. 'Why don't you do one creative subject, just for the fun of it?'
A book
It's 1983, and I'm in grade 12. I'm not sure exactly how the English assessment works – and I'm not even sure I've remembered this correctly – but for some reason we're allowed to pick an author to focus on for our final exams. For me, it was an easy choice. At that age, I'm all about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Why, you may ask, was a 16-year-old who'd never left Queensland obsessed with Solzhenitsyn? I can't answer that myself. I'd been reading all the great Russians for a year or 2, performatively, because I saw myself as the type of girl who moped around and read the great Russians. Please forgive me, but at that age I saw Tolstoy as too boring and moralistic (imagine the presumption) and Dostoevsky as too depressing (Crime and Punishment, I mean. I hadn't yet read The Brothers Karamazov.) But I loved The Gulag Archipelago and Cancer Ward. They were absolutely my jam. We were required to read three novels and one other work by the same author, so along with these 2, I chose the play The Love-Girl and the Innocent, which was okay. For my third novel, I chose One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a slim book. My old copy is only 143 pages. I've read it probably once a year since then. I can't explain how much it affected me. It's a remarkable book that everyone should read about one particular day, among many, that the titular Ivan spends in a Siberian prison camp. But to me, it's more than a great book. It unlocked something in my head. This is difficult to articulate but it made me think differently about the nature of process and made me understand it was so much more important than results. Spending every second with Ivan as he goes about his day helped me see that every tiny little thing has power and meaning in it, if you concentrate. Mindfulness is a term often tossed around, but this immersion in detail is for me a sort of active, moving meditation, and when I apply its lessons to my own life I feel wiser, and calmer, and a better person – and a much better writer.
The first line reads: "As usual, at five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters." Borrow this classic from State Library today.
Toni Jordan is the author of the international bestseller Addition, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and adapted into a feature film, in cinemas in 2026. Her novel Nine Days was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards; Our Tiny, Useless Hearts was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award; and her two Schnabel family novels, Dinner with the Schnabels and Prettier if She Smiled More, were critically acclaimed. Toni holds a Bachelor of Science in physiology and a PhD in Creative Arts and lives in Melbourne. Her latest novel is Tenderfoot.
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