Zoë was born in Oberon, NSW, and grew up in Adelaide. She has an Arts degree from Adelaide University, an AMusA and LMusA in piano, and a DPhil from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Her doctoral research was on aspects of social exclusion and involved ‘field-work’ in an infamous council housing estate on the outskirts of Oxford. When she finished she got a job as a college lecturer at St Peter’s College, Oxford. Back in Australia she was hired to do an independent investigation for the Anglican Diocese of Adelaide on responses to child sexual abuse and adult sexual assault. Since then she has held research and leadership positions in the field of violence against women and their children, including Co-ordinator of the Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault. Her research and advocacy has included other social justice areas, too, for example, she was a Senior Manager in the Research and Policy Unit at the anti-poverty charity the Brotherhood of St Lawrence, and has lectured on the politics of recognition at Melbourne University in the School of Social and Political Science. Zoë started her first novel in Oxford when she was supposed to be writing academic papers. ‘Music and Freedom’ was commended in the Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and is published by Penguin Random House. 

Music and Freedom was the winner of the 2016 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.