Jock Serong

Jock Serong is the award-winning author of seven novels, most recently Cherrywood. He is the founding editor of Great Ocean Quarterly, and has written non-fiction for outlets ranging from The Monthly and The Guardian to Surfing World, Rolling Stone, The Age/SMH, Meanjin, the ABC and more. 

He has a PhD in Creative Writing and is a Board member of Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas. Jock also writes for screen, works with judges through Australia’s judicial colleges and mentors emerging writers.

Jock lives in Port Fairy, on Victoria’s far south-west coast dividing his time with stints on Flinders Island, in the Furneaux group in eastern Bass Strait.

"I'm interested in the Antarctic as a wild place, in the very straightforward way that most of us are. But there are other angles to it: it's a site of Australasian literature, from Mawson to Shackleton to Favel Parrett. And because my fiction work is concerned with the differing versions of what it means to be Australian - from athletes to refugees to First Nations people to ordinary urban lives - I see in Antarctica an extension of that thinking: how did we come to have such a dominant role in the place historically? How secure is our tenure there in an age of intense competition for minerals, for atmospheric research, for everything? Is Antarctica, in some deep psychic way, Australia?

I'm hoping our trip will deliver some creative inspiration, as well as new friendships and experiences. I'll be armed with a camera and notebooks, desperately trying to cram every sensation into some kind of captive form. It's going to be such a privilege to share those creative aims with a bunch of like-minded people and see what we all come up with." - Jock Serong

Jock will be joining our special cruise literary retreat departure Frozen Chapters in November 2026.