About Frances
Frances Chapman is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter from Sydney.
Born in Henley-On-Thames in England, she spent her childhood pinballed between continents before settling in Sydney and finding her people. Several years as a journalist and social researcher gave her a healthy curiosity about people’s stories before she became a freelance writer in 2015.
Her debut novel, Stars Like Us, is published by Hardie Grant Egmont. The idea for the novel came when, after a string of rejections for her first manuscript, she decided to write a book which her teenage self would have loved. It was also partly inspired by a photo of Justin Bieber eating chicken on a visit to Sydney. The novel won the Hardie Grant Egmont Ampersand Prize in 2018, and the Varuna-Black Inc Publisher Introduction Program in 2017.
Frances now lives by the beach with her family and Roscoe, the most winsome of hounds. She is represented by Alex Adsett Literary Agency.
You can find her on Twitter @fchapmanwriter and Instagram @franceschapmanwriter.
Stars Like Us
From the winner of the Ampersand Prize comes this smart, swoony LGBTQ YA novel about a teenage band on the way to the top – so long as they can hold it together.
Liliana’s hitting all the wrong notes. She’s a sixteen-year-old exchange student with a secret crush on Carter, her band’s smoking hot guitarist – but she’s also got a girlfriend back home.
So when she writes a song about him and it lands the band a record deal, she quickly realises she’s in hot water.
Soon, Liliana will have to choose – between an alluring boy and the girl she left behind, between love and lust, and between the fame that beckons and staying true to the music that’s in her heart.
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