Meet the Author

Conrad Walters – Journalist, YA & Non-Fiction Writer

For many people, speculative fiction is an interest. For me, it was an imposed lifestyle. I was raised as the only child in a military family that moved — a lot. I have lived in seven countries and ten U.S. states. One year, I attended three different schools.

Every time our nuclear family landed in a new place, I had to navigate my way through unknown people in unknown lands and work out the rules that governed what seemed like its own universe. Not that I minded the annual upheavals. They were the adventures of my childhood.

I grew up, more or less, and obtained a degree in journalism. That led to a career of more than thirty years, initially in Utah and then in Australia, where I joined The Sydney Morning Herald.

In 1995, when few people had heard of the internet, I left print journalism to become the first online editor for The Australian newspaper. I subsequently returned to The Sydney Morning Herald for online responsibilities.

I cowrote a work of non-fiction, an object biography about the world’s oldest printed book. That woodblock-printed text was a Buddhist teaching. In 1907, it was rediscovered in a cave on the edge of the Gobi desert after being lost for a thousand years. In 2013, when newspaper were well on the decline, I returned to print journalism. Go figure.

Throughout all of that, though, I maintained a love for fiction, and I earned a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney. Three of my stories were published in the UTS anthology, plus one was republished in an edition showcasing the best of the program’s forty-year history.

A previous novel I completed under the title Coyote’s Revenge was published in icing sugar one birthday. Unsilent Heart, however, is the first to be published in pixels and paper.