Roanna Gonsalves is the author of The Permanent Resident (UWAP) published in India and South Asia as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney (Speaking Tiger).  She was born and brought up in Mumbai, India. She attended St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and came to Australia in 1998 as an international student. The Permanent Resident won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Multicultural Prize 2018, and was longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award 2018.  Her writing has been compared to the work of Alice Munro and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Roanna is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award, and is co-founder co-editor of Southern Crossings. She has a PhD (UNSW), has been an invited Keynote Speaker and panelist at numerous literary events. Her screen credits include working as a director, scriptwriter and script consultant for documentary, drama, corporate and commercial projects. She has been teaching, supervising and mentoring emerging prose writers and screenwriters within communities, schools, literary organizations and institutions such as New York University Sydney, UNSW, Western Sydney University, Macquarie University and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). She is a recipient of grants through the Australia Council for the Arts, is a recipient of fellowships and residencies at Varuna and Bundanon, was the UNSW – Copyright Agency Writer-in-Residence 2018 and received The Bridge Awards’ inaugural Varuna – Cove Park Writing Residency 2019 (Scotland). She served on the Board of Writing NSW (2018-2023). She has been invited to judge the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (Fiction), the ARA Historical Novel Prize, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and many other literary prizes. 

In recognition of her expertise, Roanna has been commissioned by many local and international instititions to interview / be in conversation with literary superstars like Michelle de Kretser, Perumal Murugan,  Abraham Verghese, Markus Zusak, Fatima Bhutto, Elaine Castillo, and Meena Kandasamy, with Booker Prize winners and shortlistees like Paul Beatty, Shehan Karunatilaka, and Anuk Arudpragasam, and with many best-selling and critically acclaimed local and international writers like Megha Majumdar, Mona Chalabi, Tishani Doshi, Mieko Kawakami, Fernanda Melchor, Anjum Hassan, Zhou Jianing, Tony Birch, Ellen Van Neerven, Rashida Murphy, K.A. Ren Wyld, Anita Heiss, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Omar Sakr, Shaun Prescott, Noelle Janaczewska, Mireille Juchau, Jackie Bailey, Jeanine Leane, Evelyn Araluen, Quah Ee Ling, Astrid L’Orange, Yen Yang, Suzanne McCourt, Greg Johnston, Michael Mohammed Ahmed, Winnie Dunn, Christos Tsiolkas, Claire Coleman, J.P. Pomare, Saba Vasefi, Amani Haydar, Julie Jansen, Mirandi Riwoe, Yashica Dutt, Nardi Simpson, Golriz Ghahraman, Liam Pieper, Eugen Bacon, Hannah Donnelly, Khalid Warsame, Sophie Masson, Kelly Gardiner, Samah Sabawi, Stephen Orlov, Eugenia Flynn, Priya Srinivasan, Hella Ibrahim, Jada Alberts, Lee Lewis, John Romeril, Azal Khan, Bali Padda, Ishani Das, Kersherka Sivakumaran, Osman Faruqi, Bina Nayak, and the Honourable MP Linda Burney and many others.

She is the incoming editor of Southerly, Australia’s oldest literary journal. She works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UNSW, Sydney.

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