Born in 1975, Kristel Thornell grew up in Sydney, Australia, and the Blue Mountains. She studied French and Italian at the University of Sydney and spent a year in Italy, researching the author Giorgio Bassani and then teaching English as a foreign language. She has lived in North America for much of the last ten years, in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, where she completed an MA in English at the University of New Brunswick. She has also taught Italian language and literature, French and Spanish, and has published reviews, poetry, and fiction in a range of journals. She now lives in upstate New York.

Winner: The Australian/Vogel Literary Award
Winner: Dobbie Literary Award
Winner: FAW Barbara Ramsden Award
Winner: Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelist Award

"Thornell brings her images to life on the page, and uses language in a way that is just as intriguing... For Thornell's Clarice Beckett, it was only about art always, and Thornell has created a convincing portrayal of a woman so absorbed." — Pickle Me This

"In real life, the Australian Clarice Beckett was a tonalist painter famous for her misted landscapes. Thornell evokes this same ethereality but, unlike Beckett, she reveals her own marrow only in the briefest of glimpses." — Scene

"The novel manages to capture the paintings, and the life, of Beckett. Not much is actually known of Beckett, but portraying her life as a reflection of her paintings is inspired, especially as Thornell pulls it off." — An Adventure in Reading

"Thornell's evocative, atmospheric language blends perfectly with her subject matter and is unquestionably what makes this novel such a unique read. The result is a portrait of Beckett that appropriates many of the techniques favoured by the painter, particularly, as Thornell acknowledges in the postscript to her novel, ‘squinting to soften edges and reach beyond detail in search for patterns of light and shade.’... Night Street is a beautifully crafted and compelling novel... Thornell not only enchants the reader with her well-balanced descriptions that resemble the very portraits and landscapes they describe, but also turns the reader onto a supremely talented yet tragically overlooked and undervalued painter, Claire Beckett." — The Bull Calf

"Thornell has crafted a world in which a woman artist negotiates the constraints of her era and her particular circumstances. In doing so, she has created word-canvases that depict the dark and the light of Clarice's life. The novel is rich with patterns of light and shade." — Herizons

"In this original and sensual novel, Kristel Thornell immerses us in the painter's experience and sees with her eyes. It's uncanny! She seems to write in brush strokes." — Joan Thomas

"Night Street is a sensual novel with painterly undertones, smokey and lovely. The intermingling of a woman's art and her charged secret lives forms a rapturous alchemy, electric and haunting." — Mark Anthony Jarman

"In language subtle and fluid as brush strokes, Night Street insinuates past the surface and seeks, like painting, the place where landscape and character is indivisible. Based on the life of Australian artist Clarice Beckett, the writing is flecked with arresting insights, ridged with life's exigencies. This is a touching, unusual, beautiful book." — Beth Powning