A little bit of history.

Ros Thomas grew up in Perth.  

After graduating from the University of Western Australia with an Arts Degree in Literature and Psychology she began a cadetship in radio news, moving to television current affairs in Sydney soon after. She was the first woman the Seven Network sent to a war zone, when she covered the 1998 Gulf Crisis from Israel. She reported on the aftermath of Diana’s death from London, the Heaven’s Gate cult mass suicide from San Diego and the Bali bombings of 2002. After a twenty-year career in national and international current affairs, Ros became a long-running columnist for The West Australian Newspaper with a devoted readership of 350,000 every Saturday.  

A collection of her whimsical writing, Was It Something I Said? was a UWA Publishing best-seller. Ros’s short stories have won international prizes. In 2021, she was the winner of the UK STAUNCH PRIZE for How to Leave your Childhood Behind against a prominent international shortlist. http://staunchbookprize.com/flash-fiction-shortlist-2021/

Her award-winning black comedy Iron was published in the UK collection All Those Things You Never Thought Mattered. Ros’s flash fiction has also won several awards and been published in the 2021 collection Twice Not Shy.

In 2018, Ros began writing her first novel, How To Shame The Devil, the story of an old man caught up in a #MeToo scandal from his past. In 2020, the manuscript of How To Shame The Devil was awarded an inaugural Writer-In-Residence Fellowship by the National Trust of Western Australia. 

In 2021, Night Parrot Press published How To Shame The Devil, which went on to become a 2022 WA bestseller and is now in its third edition. Ros attended 54 book clubs that year as a guest author. If you would like to hear her thoughts on writing, reading (and why books can save the world) at your next book club event, please contact her via her email rosthomas22@hotmail.com.

In 2023, Ros was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to research the emerging public health crisis of loneliness. In 2024, she travelled across the UK, Europe and the US, conducting interviews and taking portraits of some of the most isolated people in society while researching best-practice interventions into the management of loneliness. In 2025, her findings, published as the cover story of The Weekend Australian Magazine, won the Hugh Schmitt Award for Best Feature in 2025. In November, 2025, she was named Freelance Journalist of the Year at the WA Media Entertainment and Arts Awards.

In 2026, Ros continues to write long form journalism for The Australian Weekend Magazine. Outside of writing, she’s a passionate advocate for dignity in aged care, has been an ambassador for Alzheimer's WA and is currently the Deputy Chair of the WA Government’s Carers Advisory Council.

Ros has three children, none of whom read anything she writes.