Rebecca Wyldewood likes to joke that she was born holding a crayon. She was named after her great aunt Rebecca Caudill, a Newbury Medal-winning author. Growing up in a book-lined house in South Australia, she memorised a Little Golden Book when she was three years old and could recite every page by memory. She wrote and stapled together endless tiny, self-illustrated, handwritten books during her childhood, before writing a ‘novel’ aged nine. She wrote two historical fiction novels aged fifteen, edited her high school yearbook, and in 1996 co-edited a grunge Zine.
Rebecca attained degrees in both Professional Writing and History, receiving Adelaide University’s Natalia Davis Prize for the highest marks in History (1999). She co-edited the UniSA student magazine Entropy (2000). During her teens and twenties, she churned out hundreds of pages (in ink, by hand) of what would now be called FanFic, plus scenes of YA romance and poetry, and burned most of them. In the following ten years as a journalist, Rebecca wrote and edited for many of the world’s largest media companies, including Time Inc, News Ltd, Fairfax and ACP, but never stopped creatively writing behind closed doors.
Rebecca has written twenty novels across various genres. Her historical fiction debut The Lavender Queen is represented by Lindsay Guzzardo at Martin Literary Management, and is currently on submission with US and UK publishers. She received an Honourable Mention for her short story “The Sand Tracker” in the Writers of the Future Contest. Another short story, “Christmas Far From Home”, appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Blessings of Christmas (distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2021).
Rebecca considers herself an artist and a channel for the Muse. She likes beautiful words, evocative descriptions and powerfully-turned sentences. There is rarely a moment that she is not viewing the world through a writer’s eyes, paying attention to small details, scribbling notes and receiving lightning flashes of inspiration. Her pagan-wiccan sensibilities and interest in human dynamics inform much of her writing. “I believe in bringing magic back to earth,” Rebecca says. “I especially love flowers and herbs, candlelight, festival recipes, magical oils, forests, crackling fires, mysterious stones, orchards, nature gods and folklore.” Some of her favourite authors include Joan Aiken, Alison Utteley, T. H. White, Tanith Lee, Elizabeth Goudge, Tennyson, H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Jefferies, L. M. Montgomery, Saki and Chaucer.
Rebecca lives in a haunted 1860 cottage on three acres in the Adelaide Hills with her soulmate, two children, chickens and a big sooky cat. She has a butter churn, a spinning wheel, fireplaces and a well. She doesn’t have a microwave or a television. She writes, daydreams, grows herbs and flowers, drinks tea and knits, and runs a gingerbread cottage shop.