June Wright

Dorothy June Wright (née Healy; 29 June 1919 – 4 February 2012) was an Australian writer.

Wright was born in 1919 in Malvern, Victoria and educated at Malvern's Kildara College, Loreto Mandeville Hall, in Toorak.

After leaving school, she briefly studied commercial art at Melbourne Technical School before working as a telephonist at the Central Telephone Exchange in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, which formed the basis of her first novel Murder in the Telephone Exchange.

In 1941 she married Stewart Wright, an accountant.

They had six children: Patrick, Rosemary, Nicholas, Anthony, Brenda and Stephen.

Maggie Byrnes series

Mother Paul series

She wrote six popular crime novels between 1948 and 1966, all with recognisable settings in and around Melbourne.

She also wrote many articles for Catholic lay journals such as The Majellan, Caritas and Scapular and the Catholic newspaper The Advocate.

She recorded her personal memoirs and family history in two volumes in 1994 and 1997.

Wright's work featured in the Baillieu Library Exhibition, Murderous Melbourne: A Celebration of Australian Crime Fiction and Place, The University of Melbourne (10 June to 7 September 2008).

The exhibition involved architecture students designing new dust jackets for Wright's book Faculty of Murder.

Her books also feature in Highlights and Lowlifes (29 June to 31 August 2015), an exhibition on the Holdings in the Australian Detective Fiction Collection at Fisher Library, The University of Sydney which showcased 19th century crime writers such as Fergus Hume (“Mystery of a Hansom Cab”); the early Boney novels of Arthur Upfield; and Australia's under recognised female crime writers such as Ellen Davitt and Mary Fortune through to the 20th century's Pat Flower, Pat Carlon, Margot Neville and June Wright.

June Wright's novel, The Devil's Caress was adapted for stage by Wendy Lewis and premiered in Sydney in March 2018.