About CJ
Cheryl Jorgensen, (CJ), has been a teacher, journalist, broadcaster, publisher and the speech
writer for a Queensland politician.
She has two Masters Degrees, three kids and a miner’s cottage she is renovating in Castlemaine, Victoria.
She won the 4BC Dymocks Prize for her first novel,
“The Teddybear Kill” in 1995. Her second, “Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” was a runner-up in the HarperCollins Fiction prize in 1996. Her third, “A Quality of Light”, was the sole runner-up to the Davitt Prize in 2004. In the same year she won the Fastbooks Award administered by the NSW Writers’ Centre, for her Young Adult novel, “Morag Bane”.
An inaugural member of CrimeWritersQld, she has had five short crime fictions published in three CWQ anthologies and one recorded as part of a talking book. Her MPhil exegesis, “The Taint”, was published by Boolarong Press in 2008 and her nonfiction novel, “The ‘brook”, written with Al Fletcher, she originally published herself. This was then retitled “Brutal”, published by New Holland Publications and made into a 2-part telemovie by Rupert Murdoch’s company called “Westbrook”—for which she received not even acknowledgement for all the work she’d done. However the men whose stories she wrote believed the telemovie helped them in their quest for recognition of the horrors they’d experienced in that institution.
Jorgensen has had poetry published by Hecate and in the Society of Women Writers QLD
anthologies.
Her children’s play, “Writer’s Block”, has appeared three times in The School Magazine. She has had two short stories published by The Australian Women’s Weekly under the pseudonym Cheryl Rutter, and several academic articles in online journals.
Though she has embarked upon another novel which is something of a departure from her other work, currently her passion is podcasting. She has scripted a number of these, has plans for more and hopes to release them regularly into the ether.
At CJ’s place.
It will be great fun interviewing fascinating people-part of the plan.
So much to say and do. What a wonderful world we have!
