Micaela J. Ralph is a queer writer from Australia, now based in a crumbling creative warehouse in North London. After a decade designing graphic props for film and television, she turned to fiction to explore the stranger, more tender parts of being alive: lingering grief, identities in flux, and the quiet ache of queer love in fractured landscapes.

Her debut novel, Bones in the Water, is a speculative climate fiction set in a drowned Australia, where a government-built AI weather system meant to end a decades-long drought spirals out of control. In the wreckage, one woman searches for the friend she lost, the truth behind the storm, and the version of herself she buried to survive. It’s a story of betrayal and the stubborn hope that something worth saving might remain.

Micaela is also developing The Long Walk Down, a supernatural audio drama following two estranged women drawn back to the site of a childhood sinkhole. Something ancient has been waiting beneath the earth for them, and it still knows their names.

Across fiction and audio, Micaela’s work explores longing, loss, and love, especially queer love, persisting through collapse and the strange transformations we undergo when the world no longer holds us.

Micaela was part of the 2024/25 cohort of A Writing Chance, on the Faber strand.