Who is Talitha Kalago?

The short answer? A writer.

The long answer is much more complicated.

I was an only child in a single parent household and my mother, a nurse, often took jobs in remote areas of Cape York. Often she was the only medical personal for hundreds of kilometers. If a doctor was needed in an emergency they had to be flown in from Cairns base hospital, which sometimes meant handling critical trauma injuries on her own for several hours at a time.

As the clinic and nursing accommodation were usually attached, I grew up witness to a lot of horrific injuries. I have also, all my life, been accustomed to discussing injuries and operations at the dinner table.

When I was six my mother instructed me to begin carrying a note pad to write things down. Ideas, dreams, things I felt I needed to remember for later. I still have the notebooks I have filled over the years. Every year I seem to fill more than I did the year before and currently the stack of them is close to four feet high. That’s a lot of ideas.

I schooled on and off through primary school, however gave up completely in high school and home schooled. Again, being the daughter of a single parent, there was no one around to teach me or organize my lessons, so I did that myself. I was thirteen when I decided to start writing a thousand words a day, and I have, religiously, ever since. However they aren’t always words for other people.

Home schooling and organizing my own lessons did two very important things for me. It made me very self motivated and it gave me the time to pursue the things that really interested me while other people my age were bored in a classroom.

I joined a choir, took drama lessons, preformed in theatre productions in front of fifteen hundred people, went to writing workshops at publishing houses, learnt clay sculpture, worked as a volunteer at a riding for the disabled facility and got a job training security and search and rescue dogs. I was the youngest person to ever do this at the time and did a lot of demonstrations for dog handling. I handled dogs for commercials and even live theatre productions. I was also in several commercials myself and did the backing vocals for a children’s CD, ‘The Most Amazing me’ which won numerous awards.

When I was sixteen we moved from Queensland to Canberra. I decided to attend Lake Ginninderra College for two years to gain my year twelve certificate and assess the interests of other people in my age group; so I would be better informed when writing books in the young adult genre. While I was there I also did my first year of veterinary nursing at the CIT.

In 2004 we moved to Victoria where I did my second year of veterinary nursing and worked in several jobs ranging from freelance editing and photography to IT and training staff in aged care to use new computer systems.

These days my interests include writing, obviously, role playing games (the pen and paper/play by post kind), photography, horror movies, anime, drawing and digital illustration, herpetology and cooking.

I have three snakes, among other pets and do all the cooking in my household.

If you are interested in contacting me, please check my FAQ for more details.