Maame Blue is a Ghanaian-Londoner, creative writing tutor and author of the novel Bad Love, which won the 2021 Betty Trask award, and was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize. Her short stories have been published in Not Quite Right For Us (Flipped Eye Publishing), New Australian Fiction 2020 (Kill Your Darlings), and Joyful, Joyful…

Kirsten Alexander is a writer, editor and copywriter. She lives in Melbourne with her two sons. Her editing and writing experience spans print, online and radio. She has worked in-house as an editor for companies including Text, D.W. Thorpe, Reed and Random House, and freelanced for others. She was in-house copywriter for Aesop for four…

Dr Eleanor Limprecht is the author of four novels: The Coast, The Passengers, Long Bay and What Was Left. Her fifth novel, Cul de Sac, will be released by Ultimo Press in 2026. Eleanor’s short fiction and essays have been published various places including Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, The Saturday Paper, The Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings and The Big Issue. She’s been the recipient of grants, scholarships and…

Ellen O’Brien is a Garigal/Walkeloa writer living on Gadigal land. Ellen is the 2022 Program Officer for The Writing Zone and a junior editor at the Sydney Review of Books. She has had prose and poetry published in Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, Overland, Rabbit, Cordite and un Magazine and was previously a facilitator for the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group.

Alice Pung is an award-winning Australian writer whose books include the bestselling memoirs Unpolished Gem (2006) and Her Father’s Daughter (2011), and the novel Laurinda (2014). She is the editor of the anthology Growing Up Asian in Australia (2008), and created the Marly books for Penguin’s Our Australian Girl series (2015). Her latest book is the novel One Hundred Days (2021).

Alison Evans is the award-winning author of three young adult novels: Euphoria Kids, Highway Bodies and Ida. Their shorter work appears in the anthologies Hometown Haunts: #LoveOzYA Horror Stories and Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories. They work as a children’s specialist bookseller and live on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People.

Lili Wilkinson is the award-winning author of nineteen books for young people, including The Erasure Initiative and A Hunger of Thorns. Lili has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, and is a passionate advocate for YA and the young people who read it, establishing the Inky Awards at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library…

Shivaun Plozza’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Frankie, was nominated to ALA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults List, highly commended at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year Awards, and won the Davitt Award for best YA crime novel. Her second novel, Tin Heart, was nominated to ALA’s Best Fiction…

J.S. Breukelaar is the author of four novels and two story collections which have won or been nominated for the Shirley Jackson, Aurealis and Ditmar Awards among others. Her most recent novel is Remedy included in the New York Times Best Horror of the Year, 2025. Her stories can be found in publications such as Apex, Lightspeed, The Dark…

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019.  She has also been Guest of Honour at Conflux in…

Brooke Robinson is an award-winning playwright turned novelist from Sydney. Her debut novel The Interpreter is published in June 2023 as a lead crime title with Harvill Secker/Vintage (Penguin Random House) in the UK and Commonwealth countries, where it was acquired in a six figure pre-empt as part of a two-book deal. Rights have also been sold in the US…

Originally from Ballarat, Tobias Madden worked for ten years as a dancer, touring Australia and New Zealand with musicals such as Mary Poppins, CATS, Singin’ in the Rain and Guys and Dolls. He now lives in Sydney with his husband, Daniel, and their cavoodle, Ollie. In 2019, Tobias edited and published Underdog: #LoveOzYA Short Stories….

Ben Hobson is a teacher of English and Music, and an author, based in Brisbane. In 2014 his novella, If the Saddle Breaks My Spine, was shortlisted for the Viva La Novella prize. To Become a Whale, his debut novel, was released in 2017. It was longlisted for the ABIA Debut Fiction award, and shortlisted for…

Dr Lee Kofman is a Russian-born, Israeli-Australian author of three fiction books and two memoirs, including Imperfect (Affirm Press, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Nib Literary Award, and The Dangerous Bride (Melbourne University Press, 2014), co-editor of Rebellious Daughters (Ventura Press, 2016) and editor of Split (Ventura Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the…

Lauren Chater is the author of four historical novels – The Lace Weaver (2018), Gulliver’s Wife (2020), The Winter Dress (2022) and The Beauties (2024), all published by Simon & Schuster. In 2018 she was awarded a grant by the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund to visit The Netherlands to research her third book. Both The Winter Dress and The Beauties were longlisted…

Anna McFarlane has worked for several publishing houses during her thirty-year career, and is currently at Allen & Unwin where she publishes books for children and young adults. Recently published books include the CBCA award-winning picture book My Friend Fred by Frances Watts and Anne Yi, award-winning middle grade novel Dragon Skin by Karen Foxlee,…

Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize. Her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior, and her most recent essay collection is The World Was Whole.

Laura Elvery is a writer from Brisbane. She is the author of two short story collections, Trick of the Light (2018) and Ordinary Matter (2020), both with UQP. Ordinary Matter was inspired by the lives of female Nobel Prize-winning scientists, and won the USQ Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection at the 2021…

Ceridwen Dovey is a writer based in Sydney. She’s the author of several acclaimed works of fiction (Blood Kin, Only the Animals, In the Garden of the Fugitives, Life After Truth, Mothertongues, and the Audible bestseller Once More With Feeling) and non-fiction (On J.M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers and Inner Worlds Outer Spaces). Her non-fiction essays have been published by newyorker.com, the Smithsonian Magazine,…

Deborah Robertson is a West-Australian born writer and teacher, now based in Melbourne. Her first book, Proudflesh, won The Steele Rudd Australian Short Story Award, and her first novel, Careless, received the Nita B. Kibble Award for Women Writers and the Colin Roderick Award. It was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, The Age…