Jo Chandler is an award-winning freelance Australian journalist, author
and editor. She has filed news and features from assignments across
sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea, rural and remote Australia,
Antarctica and Afghanistan. She has earned distinctions as an essayist,
profile writer and narrative journalist, and is recognised for work across a
range of specialty areas: science; environment; health; human rights;
women’s and children’s issues; aid and development.

Chandler worked for much of her career at The Age newspaper in
Melbourne and was a regular contributor to The Sydney Morning Herald,
culminating in roles as a Fairfax senior writer and roving national and
international correspondent. In 2009 Chandler earned a Walkley Award
(Australia’s most coveted journalism prize) for commentary and analysis
for articles generated by trips to the Democratic Republic of Congo and
Mozambique. In the past year she has been awarded a Melbourne
Press Club Quill for Best Feature, the George Munster Prize for
Independent Journalism, the 2013 ACFID (Australian Council for
International Development) Media Prize and the Royal Australian New
Zealand College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Media Award of
Excellence, largely drawing on her contributions reporting on PNG for
The Global Mail, to which she was a regular contributor (and which
ceased operation in February 2014).

She is the author of a book on climate change field science, Feeling
The Heat (MUP 2011), which was shortlisted for several non-fiction
literary awards, and co-author of Fair Cop (MUP 2011), the memoir of
former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon.
Chandler is presently pursuing a range of freelance projects, and is an
Honorary Fellow of the Alfred Deakin Research Institute.