NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2010

Joanne Horniman has been a kitchenhand, waitress, editor, teacher and screen printer. She now writes full-time in a shed overlooking Hanging Rock Creek near Lismore, northern New South Wales. Her novels include Mahalia, Little Wing and A Charm of Powerful Trouble. My Candlelight Novel, told by Sophie O'Farrell, follows on from the story told by Sophie's sister Kate in Secret Scribbled Notebooks.

" I am a reading girl, with a pale face, and glasses. People who become enthralled by the world of books, as I am, are often thought to have dull lives, but I feel that my own life is made of the stuff of myth. Or anyway, I intend to make it so. So this is my story. It will be about birth & death and love & sex. I will make it something after my own heart, tender and dark, a little candlelight novel, started this late summer night..."

Sophie is a 21-year-old single mother and this beautifully written novel explores her relationships in all their surprising and sensuous complexities.

Joanne Horniman's characters live and breathe and find their way into your imagination to make you look at life afresh.

'Quietly breathtaking...I love it.' Phoebe Lines, 18

'A collection of delicious stolen moments.' Kate O'Donnell, 24

My Candlelight Novel is pubished by Allen&Unwin

• Read an extract of My Candlelight Novel