Francesca Rendle-Short is an award-winning writer of essays, memoir and fiction. Her books include a novel, a novel-cum-memoir, edited anthologies showcasing writing from the Asia-Pacific, a scholarly edited collection on creative writing methods, and artists books. Francesca’s creative and scholarly writing, essays, short fictions, reviews and poetry for the page and wall, have been anthologised and published in national and international books, literary journals and magazines, including among others, Bending genre (Bloomsbury), Rabbit: journal of nonfiction poetry, Sydney Review of Books, Best Australian Science Writing (New South), The Materiality of Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice (Routledge), The Lifted Brow, Between Us (Pan Macmillan), The Essay Review (Iowa), TEXT, Overland Literary Journal, Killing the Buddha (USA), Queensland Historical Atlas, Life Writing and New Writing (Taylor & Francis), AXON : Creative Explorations, Languages of Water (MVmedia), and Social Capital and Enterprise in the Modern State (Palgrave). Her artwork is in the State Library of Queensland.

Francesca has over 30 years of professional practice as a teacher and researcher and in the creative industries. She has worked variously as a producer for ABC Radio Canberra, and as editor and writer for Museum National, Muse Magazine, for major cultural institutions on exhibitions and books including National Museum of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, National Library of Australia, and for the Australian Electoral Commission and the Australian Tax Office. She also worked as a writer and editor for Helen Maxwell Gallery. She was a member of the ACT Cultural Council for many years, Chair of the Literature Committee, Chair ACT Book of the Year.

While on staff at RMIT University and earlier at the University of Canberra, Francesca made a substantial contribution to the academy and to the field of Creative Writing through teaching, research and through engagement. At RMIT as the inaugural Program Director she established the Creative Writing program as a higher education degree in 2009, and helped to grow the discipline across all sectors and levels. As Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University and Associate Dean Writing and Publishing (from 2017) Francesca helped to lead and advocate for the discipline from undergraduate degree to PhD. With David Carlin she co-founded the non/fictionLab research group in 2013 and is co-founder and co-director of WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange) (established in 2014). Francesca has a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong, she was a recipient of an International Nonfiction Writers Fellowship to the University of Iowa, was showcased in the Outstanding Field at Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and with Quinn Eades was the Inaugural John Rowe Writers-in-Residence, University of Sydney, in 2022.

Francesca’s writing and research focusses on getting in/under the skin, prepositionally speaking. It plays with form as well as content, is experimental, idiosyncratic and playful in nature, attentive to whimsy and transgression. Refusing the exegesis model, her Doctor of Creative Arts in 2009 took an eisegesis approach to creative research based on ‘loose thinking’ and faulty interpretation. Since then, she has developed her research and writing practice led by ideas of drawing-as-breathing, nonfiction-as-unconvention and/or queer-aesthetic, prepositional thinking, with/ness as cultural exchange, and communitas as method in creative writing. With Quinn Eades, Francesca is making a longitudinal ‘we-world’ (Jean Luc-Nancy), a collective, a communitas in a blackout collaborative poetry project of making and remaking called ‘We are making a boat, love’. Francesca is Co-CI on the ARC Discovery: Connecting Asia-Pacific Literary Cultures: Grounds, Encounter and Exchange (2012–2025), which was shortlisted for a CREATIVE AUSTRALIA ASIA PACIFIC ARTS AWARD in 2025. Her seven books include co-editing A-Z of Creative Writing Methods (Bloomsbury) and the forthcoming Creative Writing as Cultural Exchange (Bloomsbury).

Francesca is an Honorary Professor at RMIT University and has been appointed a member of the TEXT International Editorial Advisory Board.