Georgia Richter began her arts/law degree at Melbourne University believing that her true calling was to be a writer. In 1993 she ditched the law degree with two years to go and moved to Western Australia as the first of two students at UWA to undertake a Master of Arts in creative writing.
In 2008, a happy confluence of teaching creative and professional writing and editing, newspaper proofreading, and forming a freelance editing business with a friend, led Georgia to be offered the role of publisher of fiction, narrative non-fiction and poetry at Fremantle Press.
Georgia has long since shelved ideas of becoming a writer: there is much more satisfaction to be had as an editor working with writers driven to tell stories that shape the ways Australians think about themselves. Georgia spent three years learning Noongar (the language of the First Nations people of south-west WA) to better understand the language that increasingly appears in WA manuscript submissions, and she loves the ways the zeitgeist consistently manifests in manuscripts through their themes and concerns.
Georgia is accredited with the Institute of Professional Editors and has edited a cracking list of crime stories that have garnered awards such as the Ned Kelly and the Ngaio Marsh.
This article first appeared in issue 88 of Trinity Today.