About the Author

 

Sally is a clumsy, out-of-shape, middle-aged woman on a budget.
She’s also mired in anxiety, but she’s not going to let that stop her.
Now she’s braving her fears to seek the passion for travel she lost in her thirties,
and to bring you the info you need to travel Greece by book.

sri lanka elephant BW2 Author

About Sally:

Sally Jane Smith has lived on five continents and visited thirty-five countries, but she gives credit to Greece for turning her into a writer. She has worked in museums, universities, a language institute, a residence for people with disabilities, an art gallery, a primary school and a wildlife park. She also co-hosts two book clubs and assists the organisers of a biennial book-themed convention. She is currently based in Australia.

In 2006, the bus on which she was travelling through Sri Lanka suffered a head-on collision, breaking both her body and her spirit. A decade on, she journeyed to Greece in a quest to recover her wanderlust – and proved it is possible for an out-of-shape, middle-aged woman on a budget, equipped only with a guidebook and her mother’s 1978 travel diary, to experience a life-changing adventure. This is the story that became the ‘Packing for Greece’ series.

Sally is the author of Unpacking for Greece (published June 2023) and Repacking for Greece (published April 2024).

Writing Bio:

Sally Jane Smith completed a residency at Varuna, the renowned Writers’ House in Australia’s Blue Mountains, in 2018. Her debut, Unpacking for Greece, was named a ‘Reading Greece Book of the Month’ by Greek government website Greek News Agenda and won first prize in the Greek-Australian Cultural League’s 2024 Book Award for Prose in English. The sequel, Repacking for Greece, was shortlisted for a Society of Women Writers NSW book award in 2024.

Sally has published travel articles in Gulf News, JourneyWoman and TripFiction, and craft pieces in Women’s Ink! and Brevity Blog. She has won First Place Non-Fiction in the Port Writers Open Literary Competition 2021, and was a finalist in the Newcastle Short Story Award 2022. Her short-form pieces have been listed by Writing NSW, the Society of Women Writers NSW, and the Hunter Writers’ Centre Grieve Project, and have progressed to the top 10% of entries in the Lascaux Prize in Creative Non-fiction.

An author photograph showing a middle-aged woman with long, greying blonde hair, standing in a garden.

“Some Leafs” – the story of her great-great-grandmother’s extraordinary life on four continents – appears in the anthology Itchy Feet: Tales of Travel and Adventure, published in 2021. Her explorations of travel and grief are included in the Newcastle Short Story Award Anthology 2022 and Grieve: Volume 11, published by the Hunter Writers’ Centre.

Click here for Sally’s podcasts interviews, guest blogs and more.

Writing Awards and Residencies:

The Travel Stats:

  • 35 = Countries visited
  • 5 = Countries in (and continents on) which she’s lived and worked for a year or more
  • 88 = World Heritage Sites visited
  • 3 = Wonders of the Ancient World visited