Anita Selzer
Anita Selzer is an acclaimed author of fourteen books in adult and children’s non-fiction. Her interest is in women, gender and culture, and history. She has earned a BA, Dip Ed, Master of Education, PhD in Education and Grad Dip in Women’s Studies at universities in Melbourne, and was awarded the Peter Fensham Education Scholarship 1989 at Monash University for her PhD work on gender, history and education. She was also the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA, now renamed RTP – research training program) and the Postgraduate Publication Award for a paper based on her PhD work.
Selzer has been a lecturer in politics and English and worked in women’s affairs in the Victorian Premier’s Department as an administrative officer. She has also been a book reviewer for Cambridge University Press and the peer-reviewed journal Gender and Education.
Anita Selzer’s young adult publication, I am Sasha (Penguin, 2018), was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Awards in 2019, and is currently being taught in schools. It is about her father, who assumed a female identity and lived that identity as a teenage girl during the Holocaust to survive. A 40-minute movie, Sasha’s Game, based on this book is currently being produced.
Among her other publications, Selzer wrote a series of books on Australian Sportswomen (Macmillan Education, 2000), which focused largely on Olympian athletes; The Armytages of Como (Halstead Press and National Trust of Australia: Victoria, 2003); Governors’ Wives in Colonial Australia (National Library of Australia, 2002); and Educating Women in Australia from the Convict Days to the 1920s (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Her recent publication are I am Woman (Shawline, 2020), a memoir focusing on gender issues, and Reclaiming Beauty (Shawline, 2022), which has been nominated for the Elizabeth and Colin Roderick award for 2023.
Her next title, The Female Gaze Volume 2, is set for publication in late 2025. Expanding on the themes of the first volume, Volume Two emphasises the richness and diversity of the female gaze. Selzer writes with care, sketching biographies of world-renowned women artists and photographers, analysing their works of art to share with us how they used the female gaze in their creative endeavours.
