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…

Malla Nunn is the author of four internationally published Emmanuel Cooper crime novels. A Beautiful Place to Die, Let the Dead Lie, Blessed Are the Dead and Present Darkness have, between them, received two Edgar Award nominations, a Davitt Award and two Antony Award nominations. The series is currently being developed for television by Goalpost pictures. Malla’s debut…

Miles Allinson is a writer from Melbourne. His first novel, Fever of Animals won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2014 among other prizes. His second novel In Moonland was published in 2021 and won the Age Book of the Year Prize for Fiction in 2022. He has a Bachelor of Creative Arts and a Post…

Italian Australian author Elise Valmorbida won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2019 for her acclaimed fourth novel, The Madonna of the Mountains (Faber), published internationally in several languages. Other published work includes essays, articles, short stories, poetry, and three non-fiction books. Her latest is The Happy Writing Book, a guide to creative writing and wellbeing,…

Oscar Schwartz is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. His award-winning longform journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and The Monthly. His debut poetry collection, The Honeymoon Stage, was shortlisted for the 2018 Queensland Literary Prize for Poetry.

Gregory Day is a novelist, poet and musician from the Eastern Otways region of Victoria, Australia. He is also an essayist and literary critic. Gregory has published five novels and his work has won many prizes, including the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Elizabeth Jolley Prize, the Manly Artist Book Award and the Alfred…

Emily O’Grady is a writer from Brisbane. Her debut novel, The Yellow House won the 2018 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue fiction edition, and New Australian Fiction 2021. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Queensland University of Technology, where…

A former columnist of the year, Richard Cooke is the author of Tired of Winning and On Robyn Davidson. He is a contributing editor to The Monthly magazine, and its former US Correspondent. He has been published by many others, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, WIRED and…

Mirandi Riwoe is the author of Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction and the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her novella The Fish Girl was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Mirandi also writes as M.J. Tjia…

Peter Polites is a novelist from Western Sydney. He has written two queer noirs, Down the Hume and The Pillars, which won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award. He also won the 2020 Woollahra Digital Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2021 he was the ACT Writer in Residence at UNSW Canberra. His third novel…

Declan Fry has written for the Guardian, Overland, Australian Book Review, Liminal,  Westerly and elsewhere. His Meanjin essay “Justice for Elijah or a Spiritual Dialogue with Ziggy Ramo, Dancing” received the 2021 Peter Blazey Fellowship. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and selected for The Best Australian Science Writing 2021….

Pip Smith is a writer of poetry, fiction, literary criticism and punk songs. She was named an SMH Best Young Novelist of 2018 for her debut novel, Half Wild, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Voss Literary award, the Davitt Award, and longlisted for an ABIA Best Debut Fiction award. Her first collection of poetry, Too Close…

Richard Skinner is the author of three novels, all published by Faber & Faber, three books of non-fiction and three poetry collections. His work has been nominated for prizes and is published in eight languages. His most recent novel, The Mirror, is two short novels set side by side, described by the Daily Telegraph as…

Drusilla Modjeska has written several hybrid creative non-fiction titles including Poppy (1990), a ‘fictional biography’ of her mother, and The Orchard (1994), an auto-fictional memoir. Both books won several awards, as did Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999) which brought a contemporary eye to the lives of the Australian modernist artists Grace Cossington Smith and Stella Bowen. The…

Aviva Tuffield has worked in publishing for twenty years, including as deputy editor of Australian Book Review and a publisher at Scribe Publications, Affirm Press and Black Inc. She was a co-founder of the Stella Prize and its inaugural executive director from 2014 to 2018. She is currently a publisher at the University of Queensland…