Shirley Sinclair

Shirley Sinclair is community engagement editor at Sunshine Coast Newspapers, often moonlighting as weekend editor, features/travel writer and intern co-ordinator. She has been a full-time working journalist since 1983, when she began as a cadet with the South Burnett Times in Kingaroy. Later, she spent just over a year in features at the Gold Coast Bulletin before putting down roots on the Sunshine Coast. She has held various reporting, editing, designing and newsroom management roles since joining the Sunshine Coast Daily newsroom in 1985. Shirley enjoys helping writers improve their style and further their careers (she has tutored journalism part-time at the University of the Sunshine Coast for a decade, mentors Daily reporters and supervises journalism students from southeast Queensland universities doing work experience in the newsroom). As well as her grown-up family, her passions are travel (she is a writer member of the Australian Society of Travel Writers), music, sport and enjoying the Coast lifestyle. Her greatest joy is helping give people a voice – be that community groups, journalism students, theatre groups, musicians, artists and ordinary people doing extraordinary things.