Janis Spehr is a traveller and dreamer. Landscape, history and the visual arts are important starting points for her writing and her short fiction has been widely published. She is currently writing a collection of stories, The light at the edge of the sky, based on the life of the German photographer Gisele Freund

Rebellious teenager Phillip is sent to live with Kate, who raised him as a child when his mother Venice was in thrall to heroin. Set in coastal Victoria and then in Paris, Sea Pictures charts Phillip's coming of age as well as Kate's life in her local community and her relationship with the glamorous and volatile Venice.