Åsa Wahlquist has been a rural journalist for over 20 years.  She currently works as the rural writer for The Australian.

Åsa lives in inner Sydney, but wishes she lived in the bush. She belongs to a community garden where, with like-minded people, she at least gets to grow her own vegetables, and shovel straw and manure.

Åsa has a degree in Agricultural Science from the University of Adelaide. She has worked as a winemaker at her family's vineyard, Botobolar at Mudgee in Central west NSW. Botobolar was the first vineyard to be organically credited in Australia.

Åsa began her career as a rural journalist at the ABC. She has worked on Country Hour and Australia All Over on ABC Radio, and on Countrywide and At The Show on ABC TV. She moved to print at the Sydney Morning Herald in 1991, wanting to write about agriculture and resource use for the broader public. The 1,000 kilometre long blue-green algal bloom in the Darling River in December 1991 stirred her interest in water, a subject she loves writing about.

Åsa has won a number of awards, and is possibly the only Australian journalist to have won awards for her work in radio, TV and in print. They include a Walkley Award, in 1996, for a three part series, published in The Land, called The Gutting of NSW;  The Australian Government Peter Hunt Eureka Prize for Environmental Journalism in 2005; The European Community Journalist Award in 1993, and several Dalgety Awards, and McKell awards for rural journalism.

Åsa's interests include Iyengar Yoga, modern US literature and rescue dogs. One day she hopes to be fluent in Swedish.