Josephine Tomkins grew up in New Zealand, and has lived in Australia for many years. Her earliest memories of falling in love with writing start from the age of seven, and at ten knew that she wanted to be an author. Since then she has pursued her writing career with a single-minded passion; from school competitions, to higher education study and beyond.
She is currently seeking representation for her first novel manuscript, which is the first in a planned series and a work of high-fantasy, to which she brings her own ecofeminist twist and wry sense of humour. She is also in the process of editing the sequel manuscript.
Having grown up in and around gardens with horticulturalist parents, she has a deep and abiding love for nature which manifests in her writing. In her original work, Josephine primarily writes speculative fiction with a focus on fantasy, dabbling in sci-fi and historical fiction. She also has a particular soft spot for writing short stories with themes of ecological politics and environmentalism, often with a fabulism twist.
Josephine completed her Bachelor of Arts with Honours, Majoring in Creative Writing, and Minoring in English and Theatre Studies from the University of Melbourne in 2016. In 2019, she completed her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She also holds a Certificate of Voice and Communication Australia, from her extensive studies in Speech and Drama.
During her MFA, she curated and taught a class of undergraduate students, as part of a teaching team of three, and also presented two days of lectures on creative writing for 700 local primary school children, running several writing activities with assistance from their teachers and helpers. She was also on the editorial team as a fiction reader for the postgraduate-run journal The Scores.
In 2011 she began writing fanfiction, which she still does for enjoyment, and has endeavoured to do so through the pandemic as a way of bringing joy into others’ lives. The experience has provided the rare and enjoyable opportunity to directly connect with readers, particularly as she has developed a small following of regular readers.
In her spare time she is an avid D&D player, gardener, and a serial hobbyist. Over the pandemic, she has given DMing a whirl, taken up baking, watercolour, making scale maille, and has become an amateur vintner amongst other things.
Some of her favourite nostalgia reads include: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, The World of Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones, The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, and the works of Juliet Marillier. Authors she has recently enjoyed reading include: Leigh Bardugo, Naomi Novik, Holly Black, Susan Dennard, and Shannon Chakraborty.