Francesca Rendle-Short grew up in Queensland, the fifth of six children. She is a novelist, essayist and academic. She is the author of the novel/memoir Bite Your Tongue (Spinifex Press) that explores what it was like growing up with a morals crusader as a mother and its impact on her as a teenage daughter. Bite Your Tongue was noted by Australian Book Review as one of 2011 'best books of the year'.

Her other work of fiction is the novel Imago (Spinifex Press) that won the ACT Book of the Year. She is the author of smaller works including the novella Big Sister (Redress Novellas) and is co-author with scriptwriter Felicity Packard (Underbelly, MDA, Home and Away) of the short play entitled Us. Her short fictions, photo-essays, exhibition text, and poetry for the page and for the wall, have been published in literary journals and magazines, online and in exhibitions.

Francesca has worked variously as a radio producer, teacher, editor, freelance writer and arts journalist, as well as with a range of small and large cultural and arts institutions She has spent nearly two decades teaching in the tertiary sector. Francesca has served on a number of arts and government industry panels including the ACT Cultural Council and its committees and the Marian Eldridge Award for Emerging Women Writers. She is currently a member of Writers Victoria Committee of Management.

Francesca has a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong and is the Program Director of Creative Writing at RMIT University. Her research interests explore the potential of practice-led creative research. Her doctorate interrogated ideas of shame and silence, and how a writer’s body operates and survives as the language of process. Specifically, her research to date relates to the writing of autobiography and memoir, how images fit creatively into writing narrative and writing performance, the relationship or space between fiction and nonfiction, and creative practice as a process of discovery and response. Francesca is developing what she calls for now an experimental 'archive of the body'.

Francesca lives in Melbourne.