Suzanne Visser

Suzanne H Visser was born in the Netherlands in 1957 and has lived in Australia since 2000. She writes, paints and photographs at Craignish in Queensland.

She has written stories and painted since her childhood, and continues to do so today. Before she became a writer, she was a dancer. She studied body work with Min Tanaka and Tatsumi Hijikata in Tokyo between 1977 and 1986, co-founded the Body Weather Laboratory in Belgium with Hein Croo, and remained in Japan until the economic bubble burst in 1991. She is fluent in Japanese. Upon returning to Amsterdam, she operated Multilingual Services, providing typesetting for publishers like Brill.

Her literary debut, De pracht van het dagelijks leven, was released by Bert Bakker in 1991. Her first novel, De vismoorden, premiered through Atlas in 2000; its success led to translations in French, German, and Spanish, with the English version, The Fish Murders, arriving in 2022. While she initially composed fiction and children's books in Dutch, she shifted her focus entirely to English-language writing after 2006.

Seeking a connection with the land, she moved to Australia, where she managed a New South Wales farm before heading to Alice Springs. In the Red Centre, she worked alongside Aboriginal women and ran the town's smallest backpackers' hostel. Her academic journey began at Charles Darwin University in 2015, culminating in a PhD titled Exploring Sustainable Justice from the University of Newcastle in 2026. Her scholarly work centres on space law, criminal reform, and ethical equity.

In 2022, she founded Clear Mind Press to launch The Elephant's Tooth, a venture that has grown to include diverse authors with over twenty titles published by 2025. She also directs Sustainable Justice Australia, a consultancy guiding organisations and government sectors toward more sustainable operational frameworks.

Currently, she resides on a quiet property with a dog and a friend, finding balance through tending to raised beds with herb gardens. Her daily rhythm is sustained by a dedication to reformer Pilates, the vitality of the natural world around her, and swimming in the local pool.