Danielle is an award winning Australian author. Her writing includes natural history, essays, science-writing, historical fiction and best-selling children’s books.  Her books have won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction, Whitley Award for popular zoology and been shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards.

Danielle grew up in the fishing town of Port Lincoln in South Australia before sailing around the coast with her parents on a boat known as ‘the pirate ship’. After finishing school in far north Queensland she moved to Adelaide to study politics and psychology. Danielle worked as a zookeeper before completing her doctorate in zoology at Oxford University, studying seabirds and feral mink in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. She has been a freelance writer and researcher ever since and also teaches creative and academic writing across Australia. Danielle now lives on a bush block in the Adelaide Hills.

Danielle has written four children’s books on fossil animals including the best-selling Prehistoric Giants: The Megafauna of AustraliaPrehistoric Marine Life in Australia’s Inland SeaFrom Dinosaurs to Diprotodons: Australia’s Amazing Fossils and John Long: Fossil hunter. She has also written several adult nonfiction books including  The Wasp and the Orchid and In Search of the Woman who Sailed the World.  Her latest book is Koala: A life in trees..

Published Titles

Koala: A Life in Trees, Black Inc, 2022

John Long: Fossil Hunter (Aussie Stem Stars Series), Wild Dingo Press, 2021

In Search of the Woman who Sailed the World, Picador, 2020

From Dinosaurs to Diprotodons, Museums Victoria, 2018

Killers in Eden, 2011, Museum Victoria

Prehistoric Marine Life in Australia's Inland Sea, 2015,Museum Victoria 

The Megafauna of Australia, 2009, Museum Victoria 

Voyages to the South Seas, 2007, Melbourne University Press

The Wasp and the Orchid, 2018, Pan Macmillan Australia

Continent of Curiosities, 2006, Cambridge University Press

As if for a Thousand Year, 2006, Victorian Environmental Assessment Council

A Future in Flames, 2010