Jenny Valentish
Upon defecting to Australia in 2006, Jenny Valentish edited national music magazine Jmag (for the radio station Triple J) for four years, before taking the helm of Time Out Melbourne, sister mag to Time Out London. Jenny now freelances for titles including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Guardian, the ABC, The Saturday Paper and The Monthly. Jenny has taught journalism to students at Monash University, Collarts and Writers Victoria and mentored hundreds of interns at Time Out. Jenny also runs workshops.
Jenny's Walkley-nominated research-memoir hybrid, Woman of Substances, which investigates the female experience of drugs and alcohol, was published in 2017 and became recommended reading material on several university reading lists and is considered to be a valuable resource by drug and alcohol professionals. After its publication Jenny was appointed as a board director of SMART Recovery Australia, a consultant for the University of NSW’s National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC), and an ambassador for BrainPark, a project of Monash University’s Brain and Mental Health Laboratory.
Jenny's fourth book, Everything Harder Than Everyone Else: Why Some of Us Push Our Bodies to Extremes, was published in 2021 and has become a global hit with podcasts devoted to endurance and sport. The audiobook version has excerpts from interviews with the people profiled in each chapter.
As well as appearing at most of Australia’s major writers festivals over the years, Jenny has been a regular keynote speaker at drug and alcohol conferences and has appeared on major radio shows such as Conversations with Richard Fidler, Mornings with Jon Faine, Life Matters and Big Ideas.
