Penny Matthews has written more than thirty books for children, as well as books on subjects as diverse as Australian colonial cookery and the novels of Thomas Hardy. Country life has often featured in her work, most notably in A Year on Our Farm, the Children's Book Council of Australia's 2003 Book of the Year: Early Childhood. Her young adult novel A Girl Like Me, based on her research into the murder of a teenage girl in rural South Australia in 1902, won the 2011 Davitt Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature.