Mary Gage

Everything about Mary's life has been unexpected. 

Born in 1940 in Bomb Alley, England, Mary is one of few left who remembers WW2. Her father appeared when she was 5, from Japanese prisoner of war camp. She was educated at a girls’ boarding school and got her history degree at Cambridge, before training as a journalist with The Times Educational Suplement, where she loved working in sixties London, before leaving to marry and have children. She then started writing short stories for Argosy and the BBC as well as women’s magazines,.

A big change came in 1971. Mary's family spent a year driving across the world, to settle in Western Australia. Her book about traveling with 2 small children was published in Perth as The Overlanders' Handbook and was recently featured in a travel book exhibition at the University of Padua, Italy.

Mary turned to writing plays in the hills behind Perth, which were widely performed. The New Life was published by Currency Press in Sydney, as was My Name is Pablo Picasso when it ran alongside the Picasso exhibition at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra. The Price of Pearls shared first prize in the national play competition in honor of Western Australia’s 150th anniversary. Praise the Egg was a short novel that grew from her years of keeping backyard chickens. It was published and given a fellowship by Angus & Robertson, then Australia’s biggest publisher (now extinct).

Another huge change in 1987. Mary was flown to the U.S. by the Australian Studies Center at PennState to teach for one semester – she has been in Pennsylvania ever since, worked as a professor and administrator. She remarried, adopted a grandchild, and continued to write in any spare moments – developing Evensong on a summer creative fellowship at the Alden B Dow Creativity Center in Midland, Michigan, that was later produced in State College PA and NYC. 

Fallout is Mary's latest play, about Major Eatherly, the only pilot sane enough to go crazy after taking part in the bombing of Hiroshima. It ran in State College in 2022, and if ABV and Mary were in charge of the world, we would run it everywhere...

But Mary's main writing during the last 20 years has been about her journey from British childhood to the freeing wilds of Western Australia, where she gradually managed to find her way out of the pond that she was born swimming in. Now, Mary would love to live long enough to write about what she found in the United States – a kind of ‘ourselves as others see us’.

You can contact Mary at: gagehmj@gmail.com