About Gabriella Kelly-Davies

Founder, Share your life story

The smoke was settling from the new millennium fireworks on 1 January 2000 and I was dreaming about my ideal future.

From a young age, I’d devoured memoirs and biographies and the local library couldn’t keep up with my requests for new books.

Then it dawned on me. Maybe I should write memoirs, life stories and biographies as well as read them? It was like a light bulb exploded in my head. My spine tingled, and the hairs on the back of my neck bristled with excitement.

So that’s what I did. I started off by writing stories about people in my life who inspired me. I even approached people I barely knew who were doing amazing things and asked them if I could write about them.

I enrolled in a 12-month biography writing course at Oxford University and studied creative non-fiction at Sydney University and biography and history at the Australian National University.

In 2019, I began a PhD in biography at Sydney University. The creative component of my PhD is Breaking Through the Pain Barrier. The Extraordinary Life of Dr Michael J. Cousins, the biography of Australia’s foremost pain medicine pioneer. The book was published in 2021 and launched by the peak advocacy body, Painaustralia.

The theoretical component of my PhD, Choices, Choices, Choices: One Biographer’s Experience, explores the choices I made while writing Breaking Through the Pain Barrier and what scholars and biographers say about them.

In 2023, I spent the Trinity term at Oxford University’s Centre for Life Writing as a visiting doctoral student. Every conversation, tutorial, writing workshop and meeting with scholars across biography, life writing, English Literature, medical humanities and the history of medicine sparked ideas that resulted in breakthroughs in my writing.

After returning from Oxford, I launched “Biographers in Conversation“, a weekly podcast of interviews with biographers about the choices they made while researching, writing and publishing their books. Here’s a sneek peak of the biographers I’ll chat with in Season One.