I’m a writer. 

Here’s a flattering profile of me in T Magazine Australia.

My new novel, Seed, will be published by Simon & Schuster Australia in October 2025.

My first novel, The Work, was published in April 2024. My other books are all non-fiction and include Who Gets to be Smart (2021), Eggshell Skull (2018), and Beauty (2019). 

I’ve written analysis, opinion, short fiction, essays, and arts criticism. I was shortlisted for a Walkley Award for my investigative journalism.

I run a weekly newsletter. Subscribe to News & Reviews here.

In 2024 I co-founded Bibliocarta—a company offering travel for readers and a library for travellers.

I’m qualified to practice law (but do not) and have published peer-reviewed research. I’m currently doing a PhD in law at the University of Sydney where I also previously lectured in media law. I was the 2020 Copyright Agency x UTS Writer-in-Residence.

Together with the Women’s Justice Network I founded the ‘Freadom Inside’ project that gets books to women incarcerated in NSW. We’re now crowdfunding to pay women with lived experience to run book club programs for those still inside. Support them here. 

I live and work on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia.

Seed

30 SEptember 2025

Tour dates announced in July

An astonishing new novel from the acclaimed and bestselling author of Eggshell Skull and The Work.

Mitchell is a brilliant biologist, committed to the environment and the growing global antinatalist movement. For one month each year he lives with his colleague Frances in a utopia of radical equality and scientific dedication in Antarctica. They are concluding the Anarctos Project: a seed vault in an isolated, secret location. It is a biodiversity insurance policy against humanity’s devastating effects on the rapidly warming planet.

But when their helicopter doesn’t pick them up, and strange things begin to happen, their faith in science is suddenly not enough. Mitchell has been keeping big secrets – from Frances and from himself. The ice haunts him with memories of a devastating betrayal and questions of legacy and fairness crowd his mind.

If they don’t get back to McMurdo Station before the last flight home they face a long dark polar winter together. Alone. As the days get shorter, these two people of firm logic and reason begin finding fault lines in their perfect social experiment.

Thrilling, original and almost unbearably suspenseful, Seed offers an uneasy glimpse into isolation, love and our worst fears.

The Work 

My debut novel, The Work, was published in April 2024.

“Well this is annoying. Bri Lee—whose nonfiction debut Eggshell Skull revealed a fine mind and a stout heart—turns out to be a brilliant novelist as well. This novel isn’t just good; it’s superb. Assured, and powerful, and intelligent, and very, VERY hard to put down. Bri Lee has an established knack of articulating human confusion, pain and the cracks that open up in the systems we design to govern ourselves. And in The Work, she brings all her thrilling intelligence and her journalist’s eye to the art world, and its awkward historic dicta about who gets to make art, and how badly they can behave while they’re making it. Also it’s a love story. And a story about growing up in the country and moving to the city, observed with a perfect degree of spiky tenderness. I consumed it in a passion.”
Annabel Crabb

“like having a wine with mates after a long week and chatting about all the things that make you think—with cute, fun bits as well.”

Smart takes on books, news, and culture. Straight from Bri's desk in Sydney to your inbox each Wednesday at 5pm, plus a monthly magazine special edition full of her sexy friends.

Head over to the Bibliocarta website to see where we’re going next.