Mary Cunnane was a vice-president and senior editor at W.W. Norton & Company before moving to Australia in 1998 where she became the non-fiction publisher at Transworld (now an imprint of Penguin Random House) in Sydney. In 1999 she founded The Mary Cunnane Agency, which represented some forty authors to publishers in Australia and around the world. Since closing the agency in 2013 she has been a free-lance editor and publishing consultant. A former vice-president of the Australian Literary Agents Association and the Sydney PEN Centre, she was awarded, with Nicholas Jose, a Special New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award in 2009.