ROBIN KLEIN is an award-winning author of more than seventy books for children and young adults, several of which have been adapted for television, stage and film.

Robin was born in the small town of Kempsey in New South Wales in 1936, one of nine children. She went to Newcastle Girls’ High, left school at the age of fifteen and had her first story published at sixteen. She worked as a tea lady, a telephonist, a bookshop assistant, a photography teacher, a nurse, a library assistant, a painter, a potter and a copper enameller. She married and had four children.

Robin’s first book, a verse picture book called The Giraffe in Pepperell Street, was published in 1978, and she became a full-time writer in 1981. In 1982, Thing won the CBCA Junior Fiction Book of the Year, and in 1983 Penny Pollard’s Diary was highly commended in the same award. Robin won her second CBCA award, for Came Back to Show You I Could Fly, in 1990. And All in the Blue Unclouded Weather, the first book in her Melling sisters trilogy, won the New South Wales State Literary Awards Children’s Book of the Year in 1992.

Robin said of her writing process, ‘I can do up to about fifteen drafts. I start off making a master sheet of everything I want to say and a basic outline of the plot. Then I work straight onto the machine, not worrying particularly about typing mistakes or errors. I just want to get the ideas down before I’ve lost them. And after that, it’s just a process of going through and rewriting.’

In 1991, Robin won the Dromkeen Medal for services to Australian children’s and young adult literature. Due to illness, she no longer writes.