Rosie Waterland

Author, columnist, comedian, speaker, podcaster and screenwriter Rosie Waterland first rose to popularity in 2013 with her tongue-in-cheek TV recaps for Mamamia. Rosie’s recaps of The Bachelor were eventually receiving close to seven million unique clicks and half a million shares on Facebook alone, with author and ABC presenter Richard Glover hailing them as “the best television writing since Clive James.”

Rosie has since become a best-selling, award-winning author and a mainstay guest at prestigious writer and feminist events including All About Women and The Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House; where she is frequently invited to discuss everything from pop culture to mental health and body image to her experiences within the foster care system.

Rosie’s first book, the brutal and hilarious The Anti-Cool Girl, (HarperCollins 2015) is a full-frontal no-holds-barred memoir about surviving the very worst that life can throw at you. The remarkable debut was a critically acclaimed national bestseller and winner of the 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) People’s Choice Matt Richell New Writer of the Year Award. It was also shortlisted for a 2016 Indie Book Award, the 2017 Russell Prize for Humour Writing, and two 2016 ABIAs for Best Biography and Best New Writer Of The Year.

The prolific creative wrote her first full-length solo show in 2016, My Life on the Couch (with Vodka). Following a wildly successful Melbourne International Comedy Festival sell-out debut Rosie went out on a national tour of the live show, selling out every show and earning critical and audience acclaim.

In 2017 Rosie went on to release her first podcast; second book; and second solo show. The live show Crazy Lady toured Australia, once again selling out shows nationwide and receiving rave reviews.

This second book – a raw, beautiful, sad, shocking, and very funny memoir, Every Lie I’ve Ever Told was published by HarperCollins in August 2017 and went on to become a national bestseller. In 2018, it was named number 41 on Dymocks’ Top 101 Books Of All Time list.

In the podcast – Mum Says My Memoir is a Lie – Rosie and her mother Mama Lisa discussed their differing perspectives on the events of her first book in a frank, emotional, and often hilarious way. The phenomenally popular podcast topped the iTunes Podcast chart in its first week of release and continued to appear on the Top Ten chart throughout its initial weekly release before going on to win the 2018 Australian Commercial Radio Award (ACRA) for Best Original Podcast. It has since been downloaded almost ten million times.

Her next foray into podcasting was equally successful, with Just the Gist rising to number one on the charts before the first episode dropped, winning the Australian Podcast Award for Best Entertainment Podcast in 2020, and performing live podcast events, once again selling out shows nationwide across Australia.

Rosie’s work has been published by the Mamamia Women’s Network (where she was a senior editor until 2015), Huffington Post US, UK and Germany, Role Reboot, Cleo, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Sunday Life and Spectrum. Along with her own books, Rosie has also been featured in several popular anthologies.

Rosie’s life and career achievements were turned into an episode of Australian Story, which aired on ABC TV 2019. A contributing writer on multiple Australian TV shows, Rosie was also co-star and creator of ABC satirical political documentary series, What’s Going On: With Jamila Rizvi and Rosie Waterland, which aired in 2016.

Rosie and Jamila have once again joined forces to co-author a personal book about brain health – both physical and mental. Sharing their parallel experiences of illness, weaving together their own personal stories with the wisdom of those who have been there before, Broken Brains is a candid and compassionate exploration of what it means to be sick or to love someone who is; offering comfort, solidarity and the understanding they both longed for at their lowest points. Part memoir and part investigation, Broken Brains is scheduled for release by Penguin Random House on 6 May 2025.