Booker profile: Kate Grenville

Grenville won the Orange prize for women's fiction in 2001

Australian author Kate Grenville has written everything from short stories and novels to handbooks on writing.

Born in Sydney, she worked in the film industry until her first book, Bearded Ladies, was published in 1984.

In 2001, she won the Orange prize for women's fiction for her novel The Idea of Perfection, a tale of small-town romance set in New South Wales.

Her latest book, The Secret River, won the 2006 Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and has made the Booker shortlist.

The novel tells the story of William Thornhill, a 19th Century convict from London who is deported to Australia and clashes with Aborigines as he tries to become a landowner.

Greenville says the book deals with questions about early Australian settlers that had "obsessed" her for five years.

Two of the novelist's stories have been turned into films, the most notable being Lilian's Story, which featured Sixth Sense actress Toni Colette.

The original novel, published in 1985, follows a woman born into a prosperous middle-class family, who is abused by her father and ends up as a bag lady.

In 1995, Grenville published a follow-up, Dark Places, which tells the same story from the point of view of Lilian's father.