The Full Story

Leaving home at thirteen, Sue Reynolds, aka Suzie O'Flaherty, had many jobs before putting herself through university, earning an Early Childhood Diploma and then a BA. Hons Social Work degree. She worked 15 years for the health department and 8 years in private practice. As a clinical social worker, her roles have included head of a hospital social work department. child protection officer, sexual health counsellor, a child and family counsellor, on-call sexual assault worker, critical incident responder, and working with children and adults, victims of crime, veterans, and Carers.

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Suzie has had short stories and poetry published in anthologies and the Yeats Poetry Prize. Her two women’s fiction novels, two suspense novels, a coming-of-age historical novel, and several non-fiction therapeutic works - a DIY manual for anger, a book of counselling tips and a series of therapeutic children’s stories – are ready and waiting to find a publisher. She won the Henry Lawson Emerging poet prize, a Varuna residency, a BWF residency, placed third in Legend Press’s Luke Bitsmead bursary and has been shortlisted for The Caledonia Novel award, BPA First Novel award, Allan Marshal SS comp, Varuna Meet the Publisher, and won a BWF mentoring scholarship.

Passionate about people and their stories, Suzie lives in the Far North Coast on a farm, beside a national park with the man she married at eighteen, and where she delights in her children and grandchildren descending on her.

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Families, finding your way/place, overcoming hardship, and love-conquers-all simmer through all of her novels. While all books must have suspense, she loves reading the suspense genre and has written two of the themes. All of her books have come either from remembering one incident in her life and creating a fictional character to live it and take it somewhere, or from a what-if thought. For example, she was doing her usual early morning walk, without her mobile phone as there’s no reception, on one of the isolated roads that lead from her farm, when a ute with a ferocious dog in the back, flew past her. She thought, what if one of the angry relatives of her clients decided to abduct her? She went home and wrote the first pages of LISTEN, the book she plan to start submitting this year.

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Suzie's life, while difficult and at times hazardous, has gifted her an understanding of the myriad of places your head can land when facing grief, loss, physical and sexual assault, betrayal and rejection, which helped her clients feel respected and heard. Decades of working with a broad range of genders, aged between four and eighty, and the family and community challenges her clients were dealing with, and in a wide range of traumas, access and equity issues, and misbeliefs that blocked them from accessing the strengths they had, has given her a deep understanding of human nature that has informed the characters and her stories.

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Suzie is also clear that she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know – she didn’t realise she was anxious until going on HRT and was no longer in a storm of surging hormones and felt calm. She didn’t know she had ADHD until her daughter was diagnosed and pointed out those behaviours in her. Sometimes she doesn’t know what is not working with her novel, but loves learning, and has done heaps of it, and luckily has a wonderful community of writing friends that will help her work it out, often giving her a heap of work, but that’s how you make good writing great.