Emily Ballou is a Scotland-based Australian poet, novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of the novels Father Lands and Aphelion (Picador) and the verse-portrait of Charles Darwin The Darwin Poems (UWA Publishing). The Darwin Poems was awarded the 2010 Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize, highly commended in the Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Mary Gilmore Prize, the ALS Gold Medal and the Western Australia Premier’s Prize. She has recently adapted two episodes of The Slap for ABC-TV, soon to be screened on the BBC. She lives in Glasgow.