Malla Nunn

Malla Nunn is a former screenwriter and author of bestselling crime novels the “Detective Emmanuel Cooper” series of novels. She has been a nominee of the Edgar and Ned Kelly awards several times and has won the Best Novel at the Davitt Awards. Her films have also done very well and won numerous awards over the years.The author was born in Swaziland and her family moved to Australia when she was eleven years old. Her parents had told the kids that they were moving to Australia since they had found better paying jobs but nothing could have been further from the truth.As they grew older, they understood that they had to leave Swaziland because of the poverty. Given how poor the country was, almost every household had to depend on jobs in South Africa to survive. Moreover South Africa was at the time very racist because of Apartheid, and the better option was to move to Australia.As mixed race people in a racist country, they were right in no man’s land between black and white and this severely limited possibilities for development. Since her father did not want that for his children he put them all on a boat and headed to Perth where he had been offered a job by a Baptist school.