Mark Brandi Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: Wimmera / Into the River → The Rip → The Others → Southern Aurora → Eden
If you like rural Australian tension: Wimmera / Into the River → Southern Aurora → The Others
If you prefer city-set crime: The Rip → Eden
If you want younger narrators and coming-of-age stories: Wimmera / Into the River → Southern Aurora → The Others

Mark Brandi was born in Italy's Marche region and moved to Australia as a child. After time in Melbourne, his family bought a pub in Stawell, in western Victoria, and that was where he grew up. Being one of the few Italian families in town gave him the outsider's view that still runs through his fiction.

He learned early that every town has a public face and a private one.

The pub brought him into contact with drifters, workers, regulars and people just passing through. He has said those years taught him how adults talk, posture, hide things and size each other up. They also gave him sympathy for underdogs, which helps explain why so many of his books stay close to people on the edges of power.

Before writing full time, Brandi studied criminal justice and worked in the justice system, including policy roles and a stint advising the corrections minister in Victoria. Crime was not abstract for him. It was part of his day job, and part of family life too, with three older brothers working in policing.

Writing arrived slowly, then all at once.

He wrote on the side for years, publishing short fiction and memoir, and learning a lot from writing for radio, where every line has to carry its weight. He has spoken about liking lean prose and about the pull of writers such as Albert Camus, Helen Garner and Cormac McCarthy. You can feel that economy in his own books, where menace often sits just outside the sentence.

He first cut back his government hours and took a creative writing course at RMIT. Then a hit-and-run while he was cycling in Fitzroy left him badly injured and forced a pause. During that period he rethought what he wanted, and soon after committed to writing seriously. A short story about a father and son on a hunting trip, first published and later broadcast on radio, became the seed of Wimmera / Into the River.

Wimmera / Into the River grew through fellowships at Varuna and changed the course of his career. The unpublished manuscript won the British Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger in 2016, and the novel later won the 2018 Australian Indie Book Award for Best Debut. Readers responded to the way Brandi could build dread without noise, and could write a crime story that also felt like a coming-of-age novel.

The books that followed show how wide that approach can stretch. The Rip moves onto the streets of Melbourne and stays close to a young homeless woman trying to survive. The Others turns inward, following an isolated boy on a farm who starts to suspect that the world he has been taught is not the whole truth. Southern Aurora and Eden keep Brandi's attention on vulnerable people trying to make decent choices under pressure.

Across his fiction, you keep seeing small towns, boys and young men on the edge of adulthood, class tension, shame, loyalty and the long aftershock of violence. By the time The Others was shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly Award and Southern Aurora was highly commended in the 2024 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, Brandi had carved out a clear place for himself in Australian crime writing. His shorter work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and on radio. He lives in Melbourne.