Sonya Voumard is a journalist and author who grew up in Melbourne during the 1970s, the daughter of an Australian journalist father and a mother who was a refugee from wartime Europe. A news junkie from a young age, Sonya’s formative years were shaped by her mother’s wartime experiences, the protests over the Vietnam war, the death of her father in 1975, the sacking of Gough Whitlam and the deaths of the Australian newsmen in East Timor.Having begun her career as a cadet journalist on the Melbourne Herald in 1980, Sonya worked as a political reporter on the Age in the late eighties and early nineties. These experiences inspired her 2008 novel ‘Political Animals,’ which an Age literary critic described as “a sharp, dark and credibly drawn descent into the benthic relationship between Australian politicians and the media.” Her memoir pieces have been published in Griffith Review and Meanjin. Sonya now teaches non-fiction writing at UTS while working on a Doctorate of Creative Arts on ‘The Power Dynamics Between Journalists and their Human Subjects’.