Graeme Simsion Books in Order

If you want the essential Graeme Simsion novel: The Rosie Project → The Rosie Effect → The Rosie Result
If you want a smart relationship novel about love and regret: The Best of Adam Sharp
If you want travel, second chances, and a walking adventure: Two Steps Forward → Two Steps Onward
If you want realistic medical drama with Anne Buist: The Glass House → The Oasis → The General Hospital
If you want practical writing advice: The Novel Project

Graeme Simsion was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and moved to Melbourne with his family when he was twelve. He grew up as a science kid who also loved words, studied physics at Monash University, and later added business, computing, and a PhD in data modelling to the mix. That split, between systems and storytelling, still runs through his work.

For a long time, fiction was not the day job. Simsion worked in information technology, became a database specialist and consultant, and eventually built his own consulting company. He also wrote nonfiction for that world, including Data Modeling Essentials, a book that stayed in use for years because it explained complex ideas in a clear, practical way.

Writing came in sideways.

After reading a book about making a low-budget film, he decided to try screenwriting, adapted one of Anne Buist's manuscripts, and even helped make a small feature with friends and colleagues. The movie itself was never the point. What mattered was that he discovered he loved shaping story, scene, and character, then went back to study screenwriting at RMIT in Melbourne.

He was already in his fifties when the big turn happened. After selling his business and finishing his PhD at the University of Melbourne, he took writing classes, published short stories, and reworked an unproduced screenplay into a novel. That book became The Rosie Project, drafted quickly, awarded the Victorian Premier's prize for an unpublished manuscript, and then picked up for publication. Its narrator, Don Tillman, a brilliant man who tries to solve love like a research problem, struck a nerve with readers.

The Don Tillman books made Simsion widely known, but they also show what he does best. The Rosie Project, The Rosie Effect, and The Rosie Result are funny, but the jokes sit alongside real questions about love, marriage, parenthood, fitting in, and how much of life can actually be planned. Readers who warm to his work usually mention the same things: precise comic timing, unusual but kind-hearted characters, and the sense that awkward people deserve full, complicated lives on the page.

He keeps returning to people who are smart, capable, and a little out of step with the world around them. In The Best of Adam Sharp, that becomes a story about music, memory, and the pull of an old love. In Two Steps Forward and Two Steps Onward, written with Anne Buist, it becomes a walking story across Europe, full of grief, reinvention, sore feet, and second chances. More recently, the Menzies Mental Health novels shift into hospital settings, but the interest in work, relationships, and the mess of ordinary life is still there.

He likes a good system, even when he is writing about chaos.

That practical streak shows up in The Novel Project, his straightforward guide to writing fiction, and even in Don Tillman’s Standardized Meal System, a companion cookbook built around Don's orderly way of living. He also published Creative Differences and Other Stories, which includes shorter work from across his career and an early appearance by Don Tillman. Simsion lives in Melbourne with Anne Buist, and by his own account he still likes travel, long walks, jogging, wine, and cocktails.