Portrait: Kara Gray Smith
About Craig Goddard
I’m Craig Goddard — a writer and a photographer, living and working in Australia.
My first novel, Landing Home, arrives in November 2026. It’s the beginning of a series called Malik’s Kingdom, and the beginning, too, of a body of work I hope to spend a long time making — novels, photographs, and the quiet reflections that gather around them.
I’m glad you’re here. This page is simply a way of introducing myself, in case you’d like to know the person the stories come from.
Why I write
I write because some things can only be reached through story.
For me it begins with listening — paying close attention to what feels most deeply true, and then trying to express it as honestly and as beautifully as I can. I’m less interested in telling readers what to think than in making something they can walk into and recognise for themselves.
I’ve found myself drawn more and more toward truth than cleverness, and toward wonder rather than explanation. And I’ve come to trust that the extraordinary is usually hiding inside the ordinary, waiting for someone to look a little more closely.
The journey to authorship
Not a chronology — a few turning points, and why I kept writing.
One
When writing became something I couldn’t not do
The first hint came a long time ago. My Year Nine English teacher told me she believed I had a talent for writing, and encouraged me to do more of it. At the time, I didn’t quite know what to do with that.
It took more than thirty years — and a good deal of quieter, inward exploration — before I understood what she had glimpsed: that writing is simply one of the mediums through which my heart naturally seeks to express itself. So I began, in the spirit of honouring that truth. What started quietly has gained momentum through consistency, until it became something I genuinely love — something I feel increasingly drawn to understand more deeply, practise more fully, and keep doing for many years to come.
Two
The long apprenticeship
I came to realise that having a story wasn’t enough; I wanted to learn how to tell it well. An important early influence was Jeannie Chapman, who encouraged me to go beyond simply telling the story and to seriously study the craft of writing. That began a long apprenticeship — reading, studying, and then applying what I was learning, sentence by sentence, over years.
Landing Home passed through many iterations in that time. There was also a significant setback, when the publishing path I’d been working toward fell apart. Rather than ending the project, it eventually led me to take greater ownership of both the book and the way I wanted to bring it into the world.
Landing Home found its way home because I kept choosing it.
Three
Why Landing Home became the first book
Landing Home was never simply a vehicle for becoming a published author. It was the story I kept returning to. Through Tyler, Bel and the world around them, I found myself exploring questions that had interested me for years: who we are beneath what life teaches us to believe, what “home” might really mean, and what begins to become possible when the ordinary explanations for our lives are no longer quite enough.
Fiction gave me room to explore those questions without needing to explain them or turn them into lessons — the story could simply invite the reader in. And somewhere along the way, I realised Landing Home was not the end of that exploration. It was the beginning — the first doorway into Malik’s Kingdom.
A wider creative life
Writing isn’t the only way I pay attention. Photography asks the same thing of me — stillness, patience, a readiness to notice the moment just before it passes.
Much of what I see finds its way into the same body of work as the writing: two practices, one way of looking. You’re welcome to sit a while with some of it on the Photography page.
Some of what I’ve learned through writing and creativity has also found expression through the work Linda and I do together at True North.
What the work stands for
If there’s something that quietly runs through all my work, I hope it’s this: that wonder is worth protecting, that truth matters more than cleverness, and that beauty and craftsmanship are ways of taking a reader seriously.
Presence over performance. Hope without pretence. And, running quietly beneath all of it, the idea of home.
If any of this resonates, the best place to begin is the book itself.
And if you’d like to stay close to the work as it grows, you’re always welcome to read the Journal, or to receive Craig’s Letters.