Joe Novella was born 1967 in Victoria, to Southern Italian parents who had migrated from Calabria in the 1940's.
As a child Joe was a sports nut, playing soccer from the age of six, loved to read, watch documentaries and daydream. Joe lists Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, a book he read at age fourteen, as a favourite.
In 1987, Joe graduated with a bachelors degree in applied science (computing). Shortly after he began his love affair with travel, moving through the North American continent and then Europe, drove around Australia - sailed, walked or rode in places such as Kathmandu, Fiji, Bali, Thailand, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, India, Mexico and the Carribean.
Joe's love of travel, sport and life in general, has its source in his single most defining characteristic - his love of people, as reflected in this, his first novel, Pepe and Poppy - the seeds for which having been sewn in the back-streets of Avondale Heights many years ago.