About Emma Tom
Emma Tom was born in November, 1969,and grew up in the unfashionable western suburbs of Sydney followed by the equally unfashionable rural suburban haven of coastal NSW.
After a spectacularly fidgety career as a life drawing model, she completed a cadetship on a rural newspaper (where her main job was to insert the dollar signs in fruit and vegetable reports).
She then relocated to the city, spending eight years at The Sydney Morning Herald attracting law suits and generally making a nuisance of herself. During this time, she also conducted a nude interview with entered the Moscow Circus's infamous Globe of Death on a dare.
Our fearless girl reporter now writes a weekly humour column in The Weekend Australian where her specialties include subjects as diverse as female fungal disorders, the word "dipolar" and Belgian porn star Lolo Ferrari's international travel-restricting breast augmentations. She has also written for numerous women's motorcycling magazines as well as appearing briefly as a men's sex advice columnist in Max.
Awards and novels
In 1997, Miss Tom won the Henry Lawson Award for Journalism which was awarded for a story on do-it-yourself funerals. Her first novel, Deadset (a slapstick crime story narrated by a dead schoolgirl) won the Best First Novel section of the 1998 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Asia and the South Pacific.
Missy Tom was named as one of Australia's best young writers during the 1997 and 1998 Sydney Writers Festivals. She has also twice been listed as one of Australia's most successful women under 30 by Cosmopolitan magazine. She can be heard regularly on Australian radio, has made appearances on Nine's Midday Show, ABC-TV's Good News Week, Ten's Good Morning Australia, Foxtel's The Graveyard Shift and Channel V's The Joint and delivered a paper at the 1998 Commonwealth Writers Seminar in Kuala Lumpur. Most recently she appeared as a reporter and presenter on Seven's The Late Report.
Contessa Tom, who is currently working on a second novel with the assistance of an Australia Council grant, published a send-up of women's magazines called Babewatch with Hodder Headline last year. She also performs in two bands: The Titanics (with David McCormack and Glenn Thompson ex Custard) and All Girl Band - a six piece women's act specialising in performing classic cock rock in push-up bras.
In her spare time, Emma Tom tries not to stack her low-powered motorbike, obtains foolish new tattoos and worries about her hair.
Emma Tom is The Titanics' bass
player and resident tattoo-ed lady. In her spare time she writes a column for
The Weekend Australian and performs cock rock classics in an all girl band
called All Girl Band. Emma has written two books and thinks the best guitar
riffs ever written are all contained in My Sharona. Her hobbies include wearing
shorts, smoking cigarettes and washing her hands before she eats. Once it took
her 76 minutes to drink a single beer.
Her favourite line in literature is from Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut. It is:
"All men are jerks and all women are psychotics". If she wasn't an
atheist, her favourite line would have been "unexpected travel arrangements
are God's dancing lessons" from Cat's Cradle, also by Kurt Vonnegut.
Emma recently flew to Italy to interview leading Formula One racing driver,
Jacques Villeneuve.
You can contact Emma Tom by e-mail at etom@bigpond.com.
Emma's website: www.thetitanics.com
For the adventures of our Emma
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Emma's Brilliant Career continues
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