Spending her adolescence reading young adult novels that featured characters who were nothing like her, Amra Pajalić yearned to read about characters who shared her struggle in mediating their community’s cultural expectations. This led to her writing her debut novel The Good Daughter, the book that she wished she’d been able to read.
After numerous submissions, Amra Pajalić almost gave up hope that her book would find an audience, when her novel was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Writer and, in short succession she gained an agent, and two offers from publishers for her debut novel.
Amra Pajalić won the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature's Civic Choice Award for her debut novel The Good Daughter, re-released as Sabiha's Dilemma (Pishukin Press, 2022). The anthology she co-edited, Growing up Muslim in Australia (Allen and Unwin, 2014, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2015 Children's Book Council of Australia Eve Pownall Award for Information Books and was selected by the Grattan Institute for the 2015 Summer Reading List for Prime Minister. Her memoir Things Nobody Knows But Me (Transit Lounge, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award. Her short story collection The Cuckoo's Song (Pishukin Press, 2022) features previously published and prize-winning stories.
Amra draws on her Bosnian cultural heritage to write own voices stories for young people, who like her, are searching to mediate their identity and take pride in their diverse culture.
Amra writes dark fiction/horror under the pen name A.P. Pajalic and romance novels as Mae Archer.
Amra lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband of twenty-five years, her daughter, and their tuxedo cat Mala. She is a high school English teacher working at her former high school, teaching students who like her, are from a Non-English Speaking Background.
Amra has a serious tea addiction and, while she writes, she rotates between the dozens of loose leaf tea flavours that she has in her pantry. She always loves to hear from readers.
