Narelle Ontivero joins Avondale Arts.

Narelle joins us from Sydney, where she has been studying Colonial Australian Women’s Writing as part of her PhD program at The University of Western Sydney. She is now a full-time lecturer at Avondale and will teach English, History and will the Course Convenor and mentor for the Diploma of General Studies programmes.

Narelle’s vision for her students is simple but she is passionate about it. “I’d love for my students to feel prepared for their work lives, but I’d love it even more if they were prepared for their work lives because they fell in love with a book (or many books!)—the way the book was written, the challenges it presented and the graceful power it wielded to change the way they view the world.”

Her first gift to Avondale is her reading list of five books we absolutely must read in 2020:

Elena Ferrante’s 4-part series, My Brilliant Friend.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
Pedro Mairal’s Salvatierra (or, The Missing Year of John Salvatierra)
Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Française; and
Ethel Turner’s Mother’s Little Girl