Associate Professor Willa McDonald researches and teaches creative non-fiction writing and narrative journalism. A former journalist, she is  recognised internationally for her research in the field of literary journalism, in particular, Australian literary journalism. For nearly twenty years, she has worked consistently towards the establishment of literary journalism as a discipline of study, in particular identifying its links to democracy and social justice.

Willa's four books are all in the area, the most recent being the monograph Literary Journalism in Colonial Australia (Palgrave, 2023) and the edited collection Literary Journalism and Social Justice (Palgrave, 2022). In 2015, she co-authored the audio-documentary The Vagabond – Digging the Dirt on Melbourne. Her database of colonial Australian literary journalism is now housed at AustLit, the national online resource for the humanities.

Willa is President of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies. She is a founding editor of the international book series, Palgrave Studies in Literary Journalism, and she is on the advisory board of the international journal, Literary Journalism Studies. 

Her work has attracted national and international awards. In 2024, she became the Anne Dunn Scholar for excellence in research in the fields of journalism and communication (jointly presented by the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia, JERAA, and the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association, AANZCA). She received the Best Article in Literary Journalism Studies Prize in 2015 awarded by the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS) and was shortlisted for the prestigious national Calibre Essay Prize in 2019. 

Willa's research areas include life writing (memoir and biography), creative non-fiction writing, narrative/literary journalism and Australian colonial journalism history. She welcomes postgraduate students in these fields as well as fiction, eco, nature and place writing, and long and short narrative storytelling generally.