Liane Moriarty was born on a beautiful November day in 1966 in Sydney. A few hours after she was born, she smiled directly at her father through the nursery glass window, which is remarkable, seeing as most babies can’t even focus their eyes at that age.
Her first word was ‘glug.’ This was faithfully recorded in the baby book kept by her mother. (As the eldest of six children, Liane was the only one to get a baby book, so she likes to refer to it often.)
As a child, she loved to read, so much so that school friends would cruelly hide their books when she came to play. She still doesn’t know how to go to sleep at night without first reading a novel for a very long time in a very hot bath.
She can’t remember the first story she ever wrote, but she does remember her first publishing deal. Her father ‘commissioned’ her to write a novel for him and paid her an advance of $1.00. She wrote a three volume epic called, "The Mystery of Dead Man’s Island."
After leaving school, Liane began a career in advertising and marketing. She became quite corporate for a while and wore suits and worried a lot about the size of her office. She eventually left her position as marketing manager of a legal publishing company to run her own (not especially successful) business called The Little Ad Agency. After that she worked as (a more successful, thankfully) freelance advertising copywriter, writing everything from websites and TV commercials to the back of the Sultana Bran box.
She also wrote short stories and many first chapters of novels that didn’t go any further. The problem was that she didn’t actually believe that real people had novels published. Then one day she found out that they did, when her younger sister Jaclyn Moriarty called to say that her (brilliant, hilarious, award-winning) novel, "Feeling Sorry for Celia" was about to be published.
In a fever of sibling rivalry, Liane rushed to the computer and wrote a children’s book called "The Animal Olympics," which went on to be enthusiastically rejected by every publisher in Australia. She calmed down and enrolled in a Masters degree at Macquarie University in Sydney. As part of that degree, she wrote her first novel, "Three Wishes." It was accepted by the lovely people at Pan Macmillan and went on to be published around the world. Her latest books are published by the equally lovely people at Amy Einhorn Books in the US and Penguin in the UK.
Since then she has written four more novels for adults, as well as a series of books for children.
In August 2013 Liane’s fifth novel "The Husband’s Secret" was released in the US and within two weeks had climbed the charts to become a No. 1 New York Times Bestseller. Much champagne was drunk. Her latest novel, published in 2014, "Big Little Lies," also became No. 1 New York Times Bestseller.
Liane's youngest sister Nicola Moriarty has also released two novels, a wonderful, gripping story called "Free-falling" and her brilliant follow up novel, "Paper Chains," published by Random House.
Liane is now a full-time author. She lives in Sydney with her husband and two small children who like to climb all over her while she tries to write helpfully smashing their fists against the keyboard and suggesting she might like to watch the Wiggles instead.
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Liane Moriarty Biography
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