The Australian Women's Register

Dorothy Horsfield studied English and Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She worked in Papua New Guinea as an information officer and as an anthropologist’s research assistant in Zimbabwe. She also worked for the ABC in London, where she met well-known political journalist Paul Lyneham, whom she married. The couple had three children.

Horsfield has worked as a journalist with ABC radio and television, Channel 7, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, the National Times and the Canberra Times, as far afield as London, Berlin and Afghanistan. She ran a media company, and has also worked as a novelist, reviewer, short story writer and poet. She has been published in newspapers and literary magazines.

Horsfield’s published novels include Dream Run (1992) and Venom (2006) – a tale of politics set in Canberra and its surrounds. She also edited Paul Lyneham: A Memoir (2002).

She was a member of Seven Writers – a group of seven Canberra-based writers whose work vividly portrayed life ‘beneath the surface of Canberra’ – and as part of this collective she contributed to Canberra Tales (1988), republished as The Division of Love in 1996, an anthology of short stories about life in Canberra. The work received an ACT Bicentennial Award.

After the death of her husband from lung cancer, Horsfield fronted a national media campaign in 2002 to raise public awareness of the need for early diagnosis of lung disease. She has published articles about her visit to Afghanistan through the Rotary Club of Canberra, and became an adviser to UNIFEM Australia (the United Nations Development Fund for Women) in 2003.