Ilka Tampke was born in Sydney in 1969. She studied theatre at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst NSW and completed honours in performance at University of Western Sydney.
Ilka directed the Sydney Women's Festival, Mallacoota's Festival of the Southern Ocean and numerous other arts and cultural events in Australia and the UK before commencing post-graduate study in writing at RMIT, Melbourne.
She was writer and editor of Quest, National Journal of Adult Learning in 2010 and 2011, and was awarded a Glenfern Fellowship in 2012. Her short stories and articles have been published in several anthologies.
She lives in Woodend, Australia, with her partner and two children.
Skin is her first novel.
