Suzanne H Visser PhD is an Australia-based legal scholar, author and publisher who began her writing career in the Netherlands and later switched to writing in English after relocating to Australia in the early 2000s. She is the founder and chief executive of Clear Mind Press, an independent publisher based in Central Australia, founder and managing director of consultancy agency Sustainable Justice Australia.

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Early life

Visser was born in 1957. She married the Flemish designer, Maarten van Severen in 1976 and has two sons from this marriage, the architect David van Severen and the designer Hannes van Severen. Both children remained in Belgium while Suzanne Visser travelled the globe pursuing a career in dance and performance.

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She established the Body Weather Laboratory in Belgium, together with the dancer and performer Hein Croo.

She studied body work with Min Tanaka and Tatsumi Hijikata in Tokyo from 1977 to 1986 and remained in Japan, where she studied the Japanese language, until the collapse of the ‘economic bubble’ in 1991. Visser is nearly fluent in Japanese and can read and write it.

She moved to Amsterdam, where she ran a multilingual typesetting business, Multilingual Services, working for publishers such as Brill Publishing.

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The Author

Visser published her first book: De pracht van het dagelijks leven (The Glory of Daily Life) at Bert Bakker Publishers in 1991.

Her first novel De vismoorden (The Fish Murders) in 2000 with Atlas Publishers. It was translated into German and published as Das Japanische Rätsel by DVA in 2001. A French translation followed in 2002, Les Meurtres au Poisson, published by Noir sur Blanc; A year later the book was translated and pyblished under the title Sushi by Ediciones B. (2003). The English translation finally followed in 2022  and was published as The Fish Murders by Clear Mind Press.

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She continued her writing career in the Netherlands, publishing fiction and children’s literature in Dutch until 2002. The thriller for children De verdwijning (The Vanishing) was published by Leopold in 2005. The novel Terra Nostra was published by Bookhost in 2003, Een man met mooie benen (A Bloke with Beautiful Legs) a novel, by Mistral in 2006.

Visser moved to Australia in 2002 in search of a rural life “near animals and nature”. She ran a farm in NSW, where she began writing in English. It took years to make the switch successfully. I, Unborn, Undying (a Search for the Self) was published by For a Clear Mind in 2016. Visser, by then, lived and worked in Alice Springs, where she worked remotely with Aboriginal women and ran the smallest backpackers’ hostel in Alice Springs, Alice’s Secret.

She embarked on law studies at Charles Darwin University in 2015. The high marks for her master’s degree resulted in an invitation to pursue a PhD. However, she was cancelled by an overly woke ethics committee two years into her doctorate. Her supervisor, the famous scholar and publicist Rolf Gerritsen, stood by her during this ordeal and her subsequent switch to the University of Newcastle.

Visser now specialises in space law, criminal justice systems and sustainable justice. She published The Elephant’s Tooth, Crime in Alice Springs and The Elephant’s Tooth, Crime in Rural Australia in 2022.

Her PhD thesis Exploring Sustainable Justice was published in 2026.

Visser established Clear Mind Press in 2022 to be able to publish The Elephant’s Tooth. Inspired by the traumatic cancellation of her project by CDU, the tagline of Clear Mind Press became neither asleep nor woke, fiercely independent publishing.

She soon began publishing other authors. By the end of 2025 the press had published 20 titles. See www.clearmindpress.com

In her retirement Visser also runs an consultancy agency Sustainable Justice Australia. It advises large corporations, NGOs and government agency on the sustainability of their practices. See: www.sustainablejusticeaustralia.com

Other publications by Suzanne Visser are: Marks on Paper, Essays on drawing, seeing and looking (Clear Mind Press 2023), Never Retire, an exploration of old age (Clear Mind Press 2023), Hundred Fifty Five Sonnets (Clear Mind Press 2025), and The Great Kitschification, why AI will Never be Good at Art (Clear Mind Press 2025).

Visser lives with a group of friends in Alice Springs on a property with a dog, vegetable and herb gardens, fruit trees, bee hives and chickens. She practices yoga, reformer Pilates and rebounding to remain fit in old age.

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