Valerie Volk has always been a closet writer, beginning her career as a seven year old with a collection of embarrassingly bad fairy stories. In the intervening decades as a student, teacher, lecturer, examiner, researcher, education program director, wife, mother of four, and grandmother of six, writing has been a secret indulgence.
She has now published twelve books to critical acclaim, ranging from the deeply moving In Due Season, the nostalgic A Promise of Peaches to the ‘wickedly subversive and sinister’ Even Grimmer Tales and the ‘riveting read’ of her fourth book, the verse novel Passion Play. In the Pocket Poets series, she has published the nostalgic Flowers & Forebears, and her sixth book Bystanders, with its compelling stories based on minor Biblical characters was published by Wakefield Press in June, 2015. This was her first prose publication, but soon followed by another slim volume of poetry, Indochina Days, published in October 2015, in Ginninderra Press's Picaro Poets series and, the 2017 Of Llamas and Piranhas, a collection of poems written while travelling in South America. Valerie’s 2019 historical fiction novel, In Search of Anna, was published by Wakefield Press, and has been followed by a new collection of poems, Marking Time – A Chronicle of Cancer, in 2020 and in 2023 Witnesses, a companion volume to Bystanders.
A parallel to ‘In Search of Anna’, titled ‘Finding Emma’ published by Wakefield Press in March, 2024, has been joined this year by a Studio edition of her poetry from 2008 to 2024, Marking Seasons, with excerpts from previous books and many new poems. In 2026 Bystanders and Witnesses were joined by Onlookers, a third book in this Biblical fiction series of character studies.
While she publishes mainly poetry, her award-winning short stories have appeared in magazines, anthologies and collections. She finds her inspiration in the fascinating question: What if …?
