Edwina Shaw offers innovative, interactive creative writing workshops for children, teenagers and adults. Her unique combination of movement, meditation and creative writing creates an atmosphere where creativity blossoms and students thrive.

Edwina is a registered teacher with over twenty years teaching experience for a wide variety of purposes ranging from special schools, to juvenile justice centres, English courses for migrants and refugees, childcare centres, the Queensland Writers' Centre and universities. She once had her own language school in Cambodia. Since 2005, she has been teaching creative writing at the University of Queensland and in the community. For almost two decades she's also been teaching yoga, including to the performance dance students at the QLD University of Technology and now at her retreats.

It is this unique combination of the physical and the intellect that makes her writing workshops so much fun, incorporating simple yoga, meditation, drama and dance techniques to help bring writing alive.

Edwina holds a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of QLD (2005) and has been writing and publishing fiction and memoir since 2002. Her novel Thrill Seekers (Raven Publishing UK , 2012 & 2018) a hard-hitting look at teenage life on the wrong side of the tracks, was shortlisted for the 2012 NSW Premier's Award for New Writing.  Her chapter book for readers aged 9 – 14 In The Dark of Night (Raven Books UK 2016) was featured in the National Library Program 2016/2017 Summer Reading Club. In 2020, in response to Covid, Shaw independently published A Guide Through Grief through her imprint Red Backed Wren. Over 40 of her short pieces have appeared in Australian and International literary journals, including the 2014 Best Australian Stories (Black Inc.). She was awarded Screen QLD Talent Development funding for her feature film screenplay “M” which is currently under development with a producer and director attached. Her first project as commissioning editor was Bjelke Blues (AndAlso Books 2019) a collection of stories about life in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Since then, she has also co-edited Our Inside Voices (AndAlso Books 2020) and was editor and scribe for Byran Hartas’s Hard As a harrowing memoir about his life as an orphan boy. She’s been teaching creative writing at the University of QLD for over twelve years and also runs Relax and Write Yoga and Writing Retreats for women.

Edwina's school sessions balance all three strands of the National English Curriculum: Language, Literature and Literacy. Her workshops are fun, engaging and will get even the most reluctant learner writing. They are particularly effective for students struggling with literacy issues. She specialises in classes for those recovering from trauma, using writing as a tool for healing.