Grant Rodwell was born into an impoverished family in the New South Wales high country. He left school at fourteen years of age – without having had the privilege of attending high school – and worked as a lumberjack until he was twenty-two. Then in a watershed moment in his life (following an accident with a chainsaw and a brisk, forthright conversation with the local doctor) he began correspondence studies for his university matriculation exams: a seemingly impossible task, but one on which the much-respected doctor set considerable imperative.
Four years later, he was a schoolteacher in Tasmania. Later, when Grant was a school principal in Hobart, he took out a PhD from the University of Tasmania. He then taught at the Northern Territory University and later – as an executive dean – in the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle where he took out a second PhD. He has recently completed his third PhD.
Grant has published widely in adult non-fiction and now lives with his beloved wife, Julie, in the Tasmanian Tamar Valley where he mixes his first love of writing Australian historical fiction, with fly-fishing the trout streams and lakes of the Tasmanian lakes country. He has a son, Carl, and a daughter, Jahna, both of whom continue to be a source of immense pride to their mother and father.