Iris Lavell
has degrees in English, Psychology, and Theatre and Drama Studies, a teaching qualification, and a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature. She has written four one-act plays, which have been produced and performed in Perth, with one travelling to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe in 1999. In 2008 she was runner-up in the Short Story section of the Trudy Graham Literary Award and her poems have been published in the anthologies, Thirst and An Alphabetic Amulet. As an actor, she performed in more than forty plays through Kaff Theatre, the Collective Unconscious Theatre Company, the Blue Room, and Murdoch University. She has worked for many years as a psychologist, in a range of fields, but most often in the area of vocational rehabilitation for people with disabilities. Elsewhere in Success is her first novel.