[1] MacColl's first novel, No Safe Place, was shortlisted for the 1995 Australian/Vogel Literary Award.
[2] In the 2016 Queensland Literary Awards, she won The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award for her novel Swimming Home.
She was nominated again in the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards in The Courier-Mail People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award for For a Girl.
[3] MacColl is a graduate in journalism from the Queensland University of Technology.
Firstly, "The Birth Wars"[5] for the issue, MoneySexPower, and more recently, "The Water of Life" for The Novella Project/Annual Fiction Edition.