Cassandra Pybus

Cassandra Pybus prizewinning writer of creative nonfiction. As a distinguished historian, Cassandra has always been interested in recovering hidden or neglected stories from the past. She has written about Harry, the runaway slave of George Washington who went on to lead a rebellion in Sierra Leone in Epic Journeys of Freedom, or the dynastic machinations of the English adventurers James and Charles Brooke in The White Rajahs of Sarawak, or Lillian, the enigmatic woman who walked alone across the subarctic wilderness in The Woman Who Walked to Russia.

Cassandra has lived in various cities in Australia and North America, but her heart’s country is the south east corner of Tasmania, where her British ancestors settled 200 years ago. Within fifty years of her ancestor’s arrival, the original people who lived in and shaped the landscape of this beautiful island for 40,000 years were all gone This was the subject of Cassandra’s first book, Community of Thieves and three decades later she returned to her island home to explore more of the traumatic history of her heart’s country with her prizewinning biography Truganini: journey through the apocalypse in 2002 followed by A Very Secret Trade in 2024.