Clare Bradford

Biography

Clare Bradford graduated with a BA from Auckland University, New Zealand (1970), and a Master of Arts (Hons 1) at Victoria University of Wellington (1971. She carried out her PhD studies at the University of Sydney, graduating in 1978. She taught and researched at Victoria College, and the amalgamated Deakin University from 1988. She was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 2014 and retired in 2015. She continues to work on various scholarly projects.

Her books include Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature (2001), which won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award as well as the International Research Society Book Award; Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (2007), which was the Children’s Literature Association Honor Book; Girls, Texts, Cultures (2015) (with Mavis Reimer), which was the Children’s Literature Association Honor Book for edited books; and The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature (2015), which won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award. In 2009 the Trudeau Foundation in Canada awarded Clare the inaugural Visiting International Fellowship. From 2007 to 2011 she was President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. In 2023 she was awarded the Grimm Award, the principal international prize for scholarship in children’s literature.