Sandy Jeffs
Congratulations to Sandy Jeffs who was nominated for a 2020 Aspire Award. The awards celebrate all people who identify with a disability in any chosen field of work, volunteering, sport, hobby, advocacy, health, law, arts, writing, they celebrate opportunity, dreams, achievements of an inclusive society.
Sandy Jeffs OAM was born in Ballarat and has a BA from La Trobe University. She has lived with schizophrenia and all its moods for over 40 years. She is a community educator who speaks to schools, universities and community groups about what it’s like to live with a mental illness. She has been published widely and her writing has been concerned with madness, domestic violence and the humorous antics of women who play midweek ladies’ tennis.
Sandy is the author of the bestselling Poems from the Madhouse (1993; reprinted 2000, 2001), Loose Kangaroos (co-author, 1998), Blood Relations (2000), Confessions of a Midweek Lady: Tall Tennis Tales (2001), and The Wings of Angels: A memoir of madness (2004).
She is the author of a memoir, Flying with Paper Wings: Reflections on Living With Madness (2009) which won the SANE Book of the Year Award. Spinifex Press has released an updated edition (2024) with a new Preface and Afterword.
Her poetry collections include The Poetics of a Plague: A Haiku Diary (2021), The Mad Poet's Tea Party (2015) and Chiarascuro (2015). And she co-authored with Margaret Leggatt, Out of the Madhouse; From Asylums to Caring Community? in 2020.
In 2018 she was one of 10 women featured in the Her Place Women’s Museum Australia exhibition, at Ballarat’s Eureka Centre.
Sandy lives with her friends and animals on the outskirts of Melbourne.
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