Annabel Stafford

Annabel Stafford is a former political journalist whose work has appeared in The Australian Financial Review, The Age, Meanjin Online, Griffith Review, The Tablet, The Best Australian Science Writing, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Good Weekend. A prize-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction, she has also taught in the Creative Writing program at the University of Technology Sydney.

Her debut book, The Wanted and the Unwanted (Melbourne University Press) is the story of the Wyndham Native Hospital, born from a maelstrom of personal animosities, ambitions and beliefs and from the warring spirits of the early twentieth century. It is the tale of a hospital built three miles from a town that banned Aboriginal people, a place where men, women and children were imprisoned, left untreated and subjected to experimental treatments without their knowledge and against their will. And it is the story of those who resisted and survived to transform Three Mile into a place of hope and a site from which a new Wyndham would emerge.

Annabel teaches English at a high school in Sydney, where she lives with her partner, three children, and their dog, Wanda.

PRAISE FOR THE WANTED AND THE UNWANTED

'In The Wanted and the Unwanted AM Stafford exposes the unsettling historical truth of an apartheid Kimberley where the brutality of slavery, social Darwinism and eugenics became the foundation of pastoralism - and profound multi-generational white wealth and privilege. With her exhaustive archival research, wry eye and elegant writing, Stafford reveals shocking details of a shameful recent past in Wyndham - replete with all its ghosts and living memories of inhumanity to local Aboriginal people - that carries a profound national resonance for today's Australia.'
-Paul Daley, author of Jesustown and The Leap

'A shocking, scholarly read that lays bare the harsh history of Australia.'
-Bri Lee and Jaclyn Crupi, News & Reviews

'AM Stafford teases out the hospital's dark past in vivid detail.'
-The Guardian