Youthful characters animate the stories in a new book by a Charles Sturt University (CSU) academic.

Dr Tegan Bennett Daylight is a tutor in English in the CSU School of Humanities and Social Sciences in Bathurst. She has taught at CSU since the beginning of 2014 and is an established writer of fiction. Her new collection of short stories, titled Six Bedrooms, is published by Random House Australia.

"All of the stories in Six Bedrooms have an autobiographical truth about them, because each is about my own experience of being young," Dr Daylight said. "But the facts aren't true, only the feelings are.

"My own writing practice is hugely important to my teaching at Charles Sturt University, which is always about literacy and literature. If you know how a book is written, you have something extra to bring to students when they're trying to write something of their own, or trying to read literature critically."

Dr Daylight acknowledges that writers who influenced her include Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, and Australian authors Helen Garner and Tim Winton. She taught writing (the novel, the short story, non-fiction and genre writing) at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) from 1996 until 2013. In 2007 she was awarded her Doctorate of Creative Arts by UTS.

"I'm continuing to work on short fiction, as well as my critical writing," Dr Daylight said. "I also have a long essay due in The Australian in late August about Jonathan Franzen's new book, Purity." Dr Daylight lives in the Blue Mountains with her husband Dr Russell Daylight who also teaches English at CSU. Six Bedrooms has been well reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian.