Books

Fiction

Fortitude, TBA, 2025

Genre: Literary thriller/suspense, 80,250 words

Thomas Gwilt  hides behind his troubled marriage and disturbed clients. Fate closes in through a beguiling new client Harriet, who, by exposing his childhood crime, seals her own fate.

A psychological suspense/thriller with a strong crime element, at the heart of Fortitude is a fatal attraction. Claustrophobic and dark, it moves between a tense domestic setting and the confines of Thomas’s psychoanalytic practice. Believing there is no curative, only mitigation, Thomas becomes increasingly isolated. Self-fulfilling and prophetic, by attempting to control his own fate, he pulls the threads ever tighter – from the start, his life spiralling to a vanishing point.

With startling insights and a dark humour, Fortitude grapples with themes of free will and fate, surrender and control. It’s a contemporary story driven by engaging, complex characters, full of dark surprises and a resonating twist.

Victor, TBA, 2024

Genre: Family, dark/original intergenerational drama, 85,330 words

An accident brings a family together, evoking memories of and revelations about the death of the father Victor – grand photographer and mathematician. After years of silence, the past fractures and Jean’s abuse as a teenager is revealed.

In Chance, Jean is compelled to return to London after her mother has a serious accident, the journey conjuring the days following her father Victor’s death, years earlier. Back then, Jean’s relocation to Australia, and the loss of her world, fomented her sense of infinite betrayal.

She discovers ‘Uncle’ Daniel, once her father’s closest friend and her mother’s lover, has rekindled his relationship with her mother. The teenage pact she made with Daniel, while he was courting her mother in Australia, has kept alive the abuse she suffered at his and others’ hands. The shadow that has followed her for decades threatens to cast her into darkness.

In Doubt, Jean returns to Melbourne, evoking those early days when as a young teenager she was taken by her mother from London to Australia soon after her father’s death. The emptiness is amplified by the breakdown of her marriage. Jean takes her daughter and returns to London.

In Hope, family patterns turn. Jean confronts Daniel, his declaration of guilt trapping her further as she questions her own role in the affair. Her mother confides in Jean about her father’s rages and how he drove her into Daniel’s arms. How this and her own dislocation as a child migrant led her to leave the family and take up the job in Australia.

Jean’s idyllic childhood with her father, guarded for so long, loses its allure. Freed from her secret, she surrenders to her new lover Konrad, reawakening a guileless freedom.

In Victor,  the evanescence of one life, extinguished in an instant, leaves behind infinite constellations, illuminating the past and charting a path to the future.

Apartment C, March, 2008, Kings Hart Books, Oxford, UK.

Carl Halstead, a celebrated union lawyer, turns fixer for New Labor. Estranged from his wife and associates, he withholds vital information on GM foods, causing a scandal and sabotaging his political career. He flees London for his childhood holiday apartment in Barcelona, a legacy in his mother’s will.

Apartment C is alive with childhood ghosts – his overbearing mother, her lover, Dolores the au pair. Escaping the oppressive atmosphere, Carl begins an affair with a young drifter, Angela. Their cat and mouse games expose Carl to a new recklessness…

Read an extract

‘I found [Apartment C] a haunting memorable read, subtle, complex and powerful in its evocation of a man in the midst of personal crisis… Ruth Learner uses dislocation to allow us to see the world more acutely, and her tightly controlled, measured language and finely evoked observations are a pleasure.’

— Anne Williams, ex fiction commissioning editor for Headline Book Publishing, The Literary Consultancy, UK

‘… the writing was very assured and created a powerful sense of place and atmosphere…. The jumps in the narrative between London and Barcelona, past and present are deftly handled … I found the opening chapters extremely assured and evocative. The two plots – the mysterious political scandal (slightly reminiscent of the David Kelly affair) from which Carl is trying to escape, and the subplot about his complicated relationship with his dead mother – are managed extremely effectively and create real dramatic tension.’

— Naomi Leon, AP Watt Literary Agents, UK

Non-fiction

Australia’s Best Entrepreneurs, Twelve mini-biographies for the Australia Best series, Heinemann Library, 1998.

Careers in the Media, A career guide for students of media, Victoria Press, 1994.

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Features and Reviews

Review: The Turner Prize 2018: Art and Art Activism, April 2019

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London, Report on round table: ‘Vacant, Reading Material, Memory’, Alex Hamilton Drawings, June 2017

Frieze Magazine online (review): We Used to Talk About Love, Art Gallery of New South Wales, April 2013

Australian Art Review (review): Ceramics 2012 Sydney Myer prize review, issue 38, March/April 2013

Australian Art Review (review): Japanese Visions, Bendigo Art Gallery, issue 37, January/February 2013

Australian Art Review (review): Violeta Capovska: Testimonies and Confessions, issue 36, November/December 2012

Australian Art Review (review): Angela Ellsworth: Multifarious artist, issue 35, September/October 2012

Australian Art Review (feature): Stephen Benwell: Ceramicist, issue 35, September/October 2012

Australian Art Review (feature): Justin Andrews: Geometric Abstractionist, issue 34, July/August 2012

PhotoFile Magazine (review): Bernadette Keys’ ‘Odalisque’, July 2009

Poster Magazine (feature): Profile on Photographer Polly Borland, January 2009

Un.magazine: art review magazine, issue 5 (feature): The Gathering: The recent work of Ben Armstrong, September 2005

Un.magazine: art review magazine, issue 3 (feature): The Ancestors: The recent work of Eliza Hutchison, January 2005

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Catalogue Essays