Authors
Search for your favourite authors that are presenting at the 2025 Canberra Writers Festival
Nicole Abadee
Nicole Abadee has worked in the book industry for many years after a previous career as a barrister. She writes about books for Good Weekend, and is also a regular contributor to their much loved Two of Us column. She appears regularly as a moderator at writers festivals and literary events around Australia. Nicole is also a director of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, and 2024 winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Nicole feels extremely lucky to make her living from reading and talking – two of her favourite pastimes.
Lucy Alexander
Equations of Breath, recently shortlisted for the 2025 ACT Literary Awards, is a poetry collection that centres on Lucy’s experience with her parents’ dementia journeys. Exploring and playing with breaking form, these poems have been described as ‘… galvanizing both memory and imagination’ (Jen Webb) and ‘the only user’s manual you’ll need is your human heart’ (Kevin Brophy). Lucy’s previous publications are Strokes of Light, Feathered Tongues and Fathoms. Lucy is a resident at Gorman Arts Centre and her series of ‘Circle’ poems are on display during October at the Sharing Stories exhibition at The Australian National University.
Esther Anatolitis
Esther Anatolitis works venturously across the cultural and civic fields that create Australia’s future. Across two decades, she has held arts and media leadership positions across all platforms and artforms. Esther is a member of the National Gallery of Australia Governing Council, Hon A/Prof at RMIT School of Art, and Co-Chair of the Australian Republic Movement. Her strategic consultancy Test Pattern honours the values of art, tenacity and democracy, working across Australia on strategic development, creative precincts and public policy. A prolific writer and commentator, Esther’s work on arts and civic matters is widely published, and she regularly co-hosts RRR’s politics show Spin Cycle.
Lainie Anderson
Lainie Anderson scored her first newsroom job by listing her hobbies as beer and pasta. Her 35-year journalism career included stints at Melbourne’s Herald Sun, London’s The Times, and 17 years as a columnist with Adelaide's Sunday Mail. Lainie’s PhD with the University of South Australia studied the life of pioneering policewoman Kate Cocks and inspired her Petticoat Police mysteries, The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace. Lainie lives in the Adelaide Hills with her husband Max and their dog Pepper. The Death of Dora Black was longlisted in the 2025 Indie Book Awards for Debut Fiction.
Katia Ariel
Katia Ariel is an award-winning author, book editor and educator from Melbourne/Naarm. She was born in Odessa, Ukraine. Her memoir The Swift Dark Tide was shortlisted for the Stella Prize in 2024 and won the 2024 Society of Women Writers NSW Non-Fiction Prize. Katia’s work has appeared in journals such as Womankind, Antithesis and Archer. Katia teaches creative writing and structural editing, and lives with her family by the sea. Her second book, Ferryman: The Life and Deathwork of Ephraim Finch, was released in June 2025.
Nick Arley
Nick Arley was born in Camberwell, England, before emigrating to Australia with his family. His motorcycling journey began at age 11, and the open spaces of rural New South Wales fuelled what became a lifelong obsession. Later in life Nick moved to Canberra taking up employment in the Federal Government. During the week it was all suits and ties, but speed and adventure were never far from his mind. From competing in local offroad motorcycle events to riding across the Artic circle in Alaska, motorcycles have taken Nick far and wide. Whilst living in Indonesia with his wife Nick regularly tested their Honda scooter to its limits exploring the offroad trails in Bali. Returning home to Canberra, the desert started calling and Nick's rides became longer, evolving into multi-state odysseys crossing the country. The risks were real as was the danger, but these were the foundation for his greatest challenge, the fastest crossing of all ten Australian Deserts unsupported on a motorcycle.
Evelyn Araluen
Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, editor and researcher. Born and raised on Dharug Country and in the broader Western Sydney Black community, she now lives on Wurundjeri Country where she works as a lecturer at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, as a co-editor of Overland Literary Journal and Chairperson for the Board of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Her debut poetry collection, Dropbear, won the 2022 Stella Prize and the Australian Book Industry Award’s 2022 Small Publisher’s Adult Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Premier’s awards of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Her work has also received the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and a Melbourne Prize Career Development Award. Her recent work is The Rot.
Hossein Asgari
Hossein Asgari studied physics and creative writing. His debut novel, Only Sound Remains, was shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2024. His second novel, Desolation, was published in 2025. He currently works as a researcher at UniSA Creative.
Susannah Begbie
Susannah Begbie grew up in rural NSW. When she's not writing she works as a GP in rural and remote places all over Australia. Her debut novel, The Deed, won the Richell Prize in 2022 and was shortlisted in the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction in 2025.
Allan Behm
Allan Behm specialises in international and security policy development, political and security risk evaluation, policy analysis and development, and negotiating the policy/politics interface. Following a career spanning nearly thirty years in the Australian Public Service, he was Chief of Staff to the Minister for Climate Change and Industry, Greg Combet and senior advisor to the Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Penny Wong. His book No, Minister - an insider’s account of what happens behind the scenes in Parliament House - was published in 2015. In March 2022, he released No Enemies No Friends, a critical examination of what limits Australia as an actor on the international stage.
Cadance Bell
Cadance Bell is an author, literary critic, screenwriter and filmmaker. Her debut memoir The All of It: A Bogan Rhapsody was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year. Letters to Our Robot Son is her first fiction novel. She likes board games and short walks to the fridge.
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Maxine Beneba Clarke
Maxine Beneba Clarke is one of Australia’s most celebrated poets. She is the author of over fourteen books, including the bestselling memoir The Hate Race, the ABIA and Indie award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the Victorian Premier’s Award-winning poetry collection Carrying the World, the ABIA award-winning poetry collection It’s the Sound of the Thing, the Kate Greenaway Medal longlisted illustrated poem When We Say Black Lives Matter and the CBCA honour book The Patchwork Bike, which also won the Boston Globe Horn Prize for Best Picture Book. Her latest works are Beautiful Changelings and Stuff I’m Not Sorry For. She was the inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence at The University of Melbourne.
Tegan Bennett Daylight
Tegan Bennett Daylight is a writer, teacher and critic whose books include novels, short stories, essays on writing and reading, as well as fiction for children and young adults. Tegan’s YA novel Royals tells the story of six teenagers trapped in a parallel universe – only this parallel universe is in Penrith Plaza. Royals was published in 2023 and shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Award for Young People’s Literature. How to Survive 1985, a stand-alone YA novel but also the sequel to Royals, was published in April 2025. The same six teenagers find themselves 40 years in the past, loving the music, hating the hair, and noticing all the changes we’ve seen and made since 1985. The third and final book in the Royals series is in the works.
Aarti Betigeri
Aarti Betigeri is a multi-platform journalist and former foreign correspondent. She spent almost a decade in India, reporting across the region for global publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, the Christian Science Monitor, Public Radio International and others. She has interviewed global leaders including Jacinda Ardern, Benazir Bhutto, the former political leader of the Tibetans, Lobsang Sangay, and the former Prime Minister of Bhutan, Tshering Tobgay. Prior to moving to India she was a television news journalist and presenter with the ABC and SBS. She is the editor of Growing Up Indian In Australia.
Emma Bickley
Emma Bickley is ABC Canberra Saturday Breakfast Host. She brings joy to the start of the weekend by talking to local people about what’s on in the Canberra region. Gardening guru Graham 'Willow' Williams is on hand to answer questions about all things plants.
Sandy Bigna
Sandy Bigna is a passionate supporter of local children's literature, and reviews Australian children's books on her social media platforms at Aussie Kids Books. She has worked as a children's librarian, and has been awarded two Varuna Residential Fellowships. In 2020, Sandy's YA manuscript Exposed was shortlisted for the Matilda Children’s Literature Prize. Little Bones is her debut novel.
Mervyn Bishop
Born in Brewarrina NSW in 1945, Mervyn Bishop joined The Sydney Morning Herald at just 17. He won a top photography award but no pay increase. Disillusioned, Bishop moved to Canberra and took the iconic photo of Gough Whitlam pouring earth into the hands of Vincent Lingiari. He later returned to Sydney, leading to a solo exhibition in 1991. But his wife died just hours before the opening. Celebrated for chronicling the rising visibility of Indigenous Australians, Bishop is also proud of his "Whitefella pictures". He carved his own path, navigating the Black and White worlds of post-war Australia.
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Ariel Bogle
Ariel Bogle is a reporter with a focus on technology, law and the internet. An investigations reporter at the Guardian Australia, she has won a Walkley Award for her journalism and worked in media in Australia and the United States for more than ten years. Previously, she was a technology reporter with the ABC. Her reporting has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Australian Financial Review and Slate, among other outlets. Ariel's recent work is Conspiracy Nation.
Frank Bongiorno
Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University and Distinguished Fellow of the Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University. Frank Bongiorno is the author of three acclaimed histories: Dreamers and Schemers, The Eighties and The Sex Lives of Australians. Frank collaborated in an updated edition of the late Mungo MacCallum’s The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers: From Barton to Albanese and he is a regular contributor to media on Australian history and politics.
Alison Booth
Alison Booth has published eight novels. Death at Booroomba is her first murder mystery. She is an award-winning emeritus professor at the Australian National University, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and has published extensively in scientific journals.
Katherine Brabon
Katherine Brabon is the award-winning author of the novels The Memory Artist, The Shut Ins, Body Friend and most recently, Cure. Her work has received the Vogel’s Literary Award, a NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the David Harold Tribe Fiction Award. Her third novel, Body Friend, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the ALS Gold Medal and the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.
Troy Bramston
Troy Bramston is a senior writer with The Australian, reporting on politics, policy and popular culture. He is an award-winning and best-selling author or editor of twelve books, including Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New, Bob Hawke: Demons and Destiny, Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics and Paul Keating: The Big Picture Leader. He co-wrote two groundbreaking books on the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government. Troy is a member of the Library Council of the State Library of NSW and the National Archives of Australia Advisory Council. He was awarded the Centenary Medal in 2001.
Michael Brissenden
Michael Brissenden is an author and journalist. He has written both non-ficton and fiction. He has published four crime thrillers, The List, Dead Letters, Smoke and the most recent Dust published in 2025. Before becoming a full time writer Michael was a political journalist and foreign correspondent with the ABC for 35 years.
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Bob Brown
Bob Brown is an environmental and social justice campaigner and former senator. A founding member of the Wilderness Society, from 1978 he led the successful campaign against the construction of the Franklin Dam. He served in Tasmanian state parliament for a decade, was leader of the Australian Greens, and in 1996 was elected to the Federal Senate. His books include Memo for a Saner World and Optimism. After retiring from the Senate in 2012, he established the Bob Brown Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation supporting environmental causes. His latest book is Defiance: Stories from Nature and its Defenders.
Shelley Burr
Shelley Burr is a crime fiction author based outside Albury-Wodonga. Her debut WAKE won the CWA Debut Dagger Award in 2019, the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Novel and the Australian Book Industry Awards Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year. Her most recent novel is Vanish, the third in the Lane Holland series.
Liz Cameron
Liz Cameron is the author of Cult Bride: How I Was Brainwashed – and How I Broke Free, a memoir about her experience in the dangerous South Korean cult Providence (JMS). Recruited and brainwashed at 18 during her gap year in Canberra, Liz later escaped and now raises awareness about coercive control and cults. She lives in Canberra, balancing professional work, advocacy, and a psychology degree. In 2023, she featured in the Channel 7 Spotlight documentary The Cult Next Door and began speaking publicly about cult dynamics, recovery, and the psychology of manipulation.
Oceane Campbell
Oceane Campbell is a proud and passionate midwife, writer and mother of three. In her latest book, Labour of Love, Oceane shares birth stories with illuminating insights into the issues of consent, risk and autonomy that exist in our maternity care system. Oceane’s first book The Silence Between Us: A Mother and Daughter’s Conversation Through Suicide and into Life, is a raw and original double memoir tracing mother and daughter as they try to understand and rebuild their relationship after Oceane’s suicide attempt as a teenager. In 2022, she was named Newcastle Woman of the Year for her advocacy work in mental health and improving LGBTIQ+ families' access to maternity care.
Tabitha Carvan
Tabitha Carvan is the author of the memoir This Is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch and a freelance writer on the side. Her writing on pop culture, family, and science has been featured in publications including Guardian Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, The Saturday Paper, Galah, Australian Geographic and the past four previous editions of The Best Australian Science Writing. She lives with her family on Ngunnawal Country.
Shankari Chandran
Shankari Chandran was raised on Ngunnawal Country. She is an Australian Tamil lawyer and author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Song of the Sun God, The Barrier, Safe Haven and Unfinished Business. In 2023 she won the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2023 for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.
Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman is a multidisciplinary expert in marketing, education and environmental management. She has postgraduate degrees in counselling, environmental science, education and animal-assisted interventions, and is studying a double Masters in Counselling & Education (Autism). She’s a passionate WIRES wildlife rescue volunteer and brings her love of lifelong learning to all she does. In Inside Out Tracy describes with passion and insight the fight she took up to help free her friend, Kathleen Folbigg, and shares her hopes that their story will prevent other women from suffering as Kath did over those long twenty years.
Jonty Claypole
Jonty Claypole is CEO of Red Room Poetry and co-host of the Secret Life of Books. He was formerly Director of Arts at the BBC and ran many literature programs and campaigns, sat on the advisory board of the Booker Prize and was regularly in The Bookseller’s ‘100 Most Influential People in Publishing’. He is the author of Words Fail Us: In Defence of Dysfluency.
Anne-Marie Condé
Anne-Marie grew up in Hobart and studied history at the University of Tasmania and Monash University. A summer internship at the Australian War Memorial led to a long career as a historian and curator in Canberra, working in three further national cultural institutions. Currently she is a senior curator at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House. Anne-Marie loves to write about the encounters between people, places and historical artefacts, and her essays appear regularly in the online magazine Inside Story. Her book, The Prime Minister’s Potato and Other Essays was published earlier this year by Upswell Publishing.
David Conley
David Conley is an award-winning author and illustrator. He has been navigating the world of self-publishing for five years and has released 13 books in that time. David uses graphic illustrations and clear, concise writing to communicate big ideas to little people. He performs solo book shows, runs workshops and communicates with kids about the benefits of learning, questioning and creating works about the world around us. David's latest book is That Book About Life Before Dinosaurs.
Phillip Coorey
Phillip Coorey is the political editor of The Australian Financial Review based in Canberra. He is a two-time winner of the Paul Lyneham award for press gallery excellence.
Stephen Corby
Stephen Corby has been a journalist for more than 30 years, but when he grows up he'd really like to be a writer. He has written about everything from politics to music and travel but mostly wastes his time covering cars, which make very boring interview subjects. He's also the co-founder of EV Central. His first book is finished and will be published next year.
Craig Cormick OAM
Craig Cormick OAM is an award-winning author and science communicator. He has been a Writer in Residence in Malaysia and in Antarctica and writes fiction, non-fiction and children's books. He is a former Chair of the ACT Writers Centre and his latest book – cowritten with First Nations author Darren Rix - is the award-winning Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People.
Andrew Cox
Andrew Cox is a proud Filipino/Australian who lives and works on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, and is the current creative producer of the Canberra Poetry Slam. With a desire to see people experience poetry and engage deeply, his live performances are memorable for intensity, honesty and abstract storytelling. His work crosses boundaries, performing in high schools as well as major Australia-wide competitions, to spoken word theatre productions. Andrew's work has been shortlisted for national writing prizes, notably for Innovation in Spoken Word, and his writing published in multiple anthologies, in recognition of him as an emerging voice in Australian poetry.
Judith Nangala Crispin
Judith Nangala Crispin is an acclaimed poet, visual artist, motorcyclist, conservationist and volunteer firefighter, who lives on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country near Braidwood on the NSW Southern Tablelands. Her poetry has won the Blake Prize, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and been shortlisted for many awards including the Peter Porter Prize. Her visual art has won her residencies, awards, and wide acclaim, here and overseas. She has published two collections of poetry, The Myrrh-Bearers and The Lumen Seed. She is releasing her third, and most extensive book, The Dingo’s Noctuary. She spends part of each year living and working with the Warlpiri, her adopted people, in the Northern Tanami Desert. Judith is a descendant of Bpangerang people from the Murray River and acknowledges heritage from Scotland, Ireland, France, Armenia, Mali, Senegal and the Ivory Coast.
Brenda L Croft
Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra Peoples, Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and has Anglo-Australian/Chinese/German/Irish/Scottish heritage. For four decades Brenda has undertaken a leading role in national and international First Nations and broader contemporary arts and cultural sectors as a multi-disciplinary creative practitioner (academic, administrator, artist, curator, educator, researcher and scholar). Brenda’s creative-led research encompasses Critical Indigenous Performative Collaborative Autoethnography, Storywork methodologies and theoretical frameworks. For over three decades, Brenda has worked closely with her patrilineal family and community, with Australian First communities nationally, and international First Nations, Indigenous and People-of-Colour colleagues.
Erin Cross is a writer, editor and digital storyteller who has called Canberra home her entire life. As Online Editor for HerCanberra since 2021, she champions local voices and celebrates the city she loves, turning her childhood dream of telling stories into reality. A University of Canberra Journalism graduate, Erin brings professional media expertise and genuine literary passion to her festival moderator role. As an avid reader with authorial aspirations, she offers unique insights into writing craft and audience connection challenges.
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Kate Cuthbert
Kate Cuthbert is the Publishing Director at Books+Publishing, Australia’s news and information website for the book sector. Previously, she held senior roles at Pantera Press, Writers Victoria and launched the Escape Publishing brand at Harlequin Australia. Her book on the creation, impact, and language of book covers and titles, How to Judge a Book by its Cover, will be released in late 2025. She is also a co-host on the popular podcast What Would Danbury Do?.
Paul Daley
Paul Daley is the author of five non-fiction books and three novels, including his latest The Leap – a literary thriller set in a remote town marred by the legacies of colonial racial violence. His previous novel was the critically-praised Jesustown, about cultural theft and Australian frontier violence. His books have been shortlisted in major Australian literary awards including the Prime Minister’s History Prize. He is an essayist, a multi-award-winning journalist and a columnist for Guardian Australia where he writes about Australian national identity, often with a focus on frontier war, national commemoration and Anzac mythology.
Trent Dalton
Trent Dalton is a two-time Walkley Award-winning journalist and the international bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, All Our Shimmering Skies, Love Stories, Lola in the Mirror and Gravity Let Me Go. The critically acclaimed stage adaptation of Love Stories is currently touring nationally.
David Day
David Day has written more than twenty books to great acclaim, both in Australia and overseas. Apart from eight political biographies, including prize-winning biographies of John Curtin and Ben Chifley, he has written several books about the Second World War and others on Antarctica. His landmark history of Australia, Claiming a Continent, won the South Australian Festival Prize for Non-Fiction, while his book Conquest: How societies overwhelm others has been translated into several languages. He has served as the official historian of the Australian Customs Service and the Bureau of Meteorology, and been an Australian Research Council senior research fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he is currently based.
Brigid Delaney
Brigid Delaney has worked as a lawyer, journalist, travel writer and screenwriter and, most recently, as a speechwriter for two federal cabinet ministers. She is co-creator and associate producer of the Netflix smash hit Wellmania and wrote the long-running and popular Guardian Australia column 'Brigid Delaney's Diary'. Her previous books include This Restless Life, Wild Things, Wellmania and Reasons Not to Worry, which has been published in North America and the United Kingdom and translated into nineteen languages. Her latest book is The Seeker and the Sage. She writes 'The Chaos Era with Brigid Delaney' Substack, and lives in Sydney.
Garry Disher
Garry Disher grew up on a farm in the mid-north of South Australia, the setting of his popular Hirsch crime novels and the Booker Prize nominated literary novel, The Sunken Road. A full-time writer, he lives on the Mornington Peninsula and is the author of 60 titles: general and children’s/young adult fiction, and the widely translated and award-winning Hirsch, Wyatt and Peninsula crime novels. In 2023 he was awarded the Australian Crime Writers Association’s lifetime achievement award. His latest titles are the fifth Hirsch novel, Mischance Creek, and a stand-alone thriller, Sanctuary, shortlisted for several awards.
Tim Dobbyn
Tim Dobbyn is a former journalist who started at Australian Associated Press in 1981 before moving to the United States in 1987 to work for Reuters. After taking a break from daily journalism, he worked freelance jobs before starting work on the Mervyn Bishop biography in 2018. He and his family have known Bishop since 1962. He lives near Washington D.C. with his wife Sheila.
Martin Dolan
Martin Dolan is a Canberra poet who has been writing and publishing for twenty-five years. Some years ago, he gave up his moonlighting as a public servant to pursue his writing. He has been one of the organisers of That Poetry Thing, Canberra’s home of poetry, since 2017. Martin is also chair of Australian Poetry, the national body for Australian poetry.
Grant Dooley
Grant Dooley is a former diplomat who served in the Australian Embassy in Jakarta from 2004-07. This period corresponded with a turbulent time in Indonesia’s history, including the 2004 bombing of the Australian Embassy, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Islamic riots, multiple terror attacks and the crash of Garuda Flight 200 in Yogyakarta in 2007, in which five of Grant’s close friends and colleagues died. Not only did Grant bear witness to these events, but he was also a first responder to the Embassy bombing and the Garuda plane crash. Since leaving DFAT in 2012, Grant has carved out a successful career in finance, as a fund manager and private investor, working largely in Asia. He has recently released Bomb Season in Jakarta.
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Ursula Dubosarsky
Ursula Dubosarsky wanted to be a writer from the age of six. Born and based in Sydney, she is now the author of over 60 books for children and young adults. Ursula has won numerous national awards and has been nominated for the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen and Astrid Lindgren prizes. In 2020 she was appointed the Australian Children’s Laureate. Ursula fondly remembers her childhood cat, Ricky and loved writing about Matthew Flinders’ own famous feline, Trim.
Griffin Dunne
While known for his starring roles in iconic films like An American Werewolf in London and Martin Scorsese's After Hours, Golden Globe Award nominee Griffin Dunne continues to charm audiences and critics alike in such shows as NBC series This Is Us, opposite Mandy Moore and Sterling K. Brown. Other acting credits include the Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club, as well as Joey Soloway’s provocative Amazon Studios dramedy I Love Dick opposite Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Hahn. Griffin debuted as a director with his Oscar nominated short film Duke of Groove and has since directed Addicted to Love with Meg Ryan, Practical Magic with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, and the critically acclaimed Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold about his aunt Joan Didion. Most recently, he can be seen in Darren Aaronofsky’s Caught Stealing and just completed filming Joy Will Prevail where he portrayed the famous architect Louis Kahn. His New York Times bestselling family memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, is more than a celebrity memoir – it’s a poignant, funny family story capturing the absurdities, flaws and love of its characters, including the author himself.
Astrid Edwards
Astrid Edwards is a bibliophile and literary critic. She founded The Garret: Writing and Publishing, regularly moderates literary events and judges literary prizes, and was the Chair of Judges for the 2025 Stella Prize.
Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world. His new nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is an instant New York Times bestseller.
Theodore Ell
Theodore Ell is a writer and researcher in literature at the Australian National University. His work has been published in Australia, Italy, the UK and Lebanon. From 2018 to 2021 he lived in Lebanon, and his memoir Lebanon Days recounts his experiences of revolution, economic collapse and surviving the 2020 Beirut explosion. Theodore holds a PhD from the University of Sydney, co-founded Contrappasso Magazine and has worked as an editor, translator and public servant. Theodore’s essay Façades of Lebanon won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize and his poetry collection Beginning in Sight shared the 2022 Anne Elder Award.
Kate Evans
Kate Evans is the co-host (with Cassie McCullagh) of ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf and is one of the hosts of Top 100 Books. She regularly interviews authors at writers festivals, with a particular interest in fiction and history. She has a PhD in cultural history.
Gavin Fang
Gavin Fang is the ABC's Editorial Director. He's been a journalist for the past three decades with experience in print and broadcast. Prior to his current role, Gavin was Deputy Director of ABC News where he also oversaw the National and International reporting teams. Previously Gavin has been a producer and reporter, including as Indonesia Correspondent for the ABC's international service. He is co-editor of Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation.
Kathryn Favelle
Kathryn Favelle is a reader, writer and oral history interviewer. Until recently, she was Director, Reader Services at the National Library of Australia, where those interests drove her support of all those who came to explore the collection.
Nigel Featherstone
Nigel Featherstone is a writer for the page, stage, and music. His novel Bodies of Men was longlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, shortlisted for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year, and shortlisted in the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards. In 2025, The Story of the Oars, Nigel’s play with spokenword songs, had its world premiere at The Street Theatre, Canberra. He also wrote the libretto for highly regarded song cycle, The Weight of Light. He is the founder of Hell Herons, a spoken-word+music collective that released its debut album, The Wreck Event, in 2024. Nigel’s short works – prose and poetry – have appeared in Meanjin, Overland, Island, Review of Australian Fiction, Rabbit, Guardian Australia, Sydney Morning Herald, The Millions, and Chicago Quarterly Review, among other outlets.
Dakota Feirer
Dakota Feirer is a Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr man based on Lenape and Yuin lands. His debut poetry collection, Arsenic Flower confronts the legacies of colonial violence and explores the cultural wisdom still echoing in the contemporary blak experience. Dakota believes in healing Country and our communities through art and storytelling.
Clinton Fernandes
Clinton Fernandes is Professor of International and Political Studies in the Future Operations Research Group at the University of New South Wales. He assesses the threats, risks and opportunities that military forces will face in the future. He co-founded the Indo-Pacific Studies program at UNSW. He is a former intelligence officer in the Australian Army.
Elizabeth Finkel
Elizabeth Finkel holds a PhD in biochemistry and spent ten years as a research scientist before becoming an award-winning journalist and author of The Genome Generation, among other books. She is a founding editor of Cosmos magazine and a regular contributor to the US magazine Science, Radio National's Science Show and The Monthly. Her awards include a Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Stem Cells: Controversy at the Frontiers of Science, the National Press Club's award for Higher Education Journalist of the Year and the Eureka Award for Science Journalism.
Pip Finkemeyer
Pip Finkemeyer is a novelist living in Naarm/Melbourne. Her debut Sad Girl Novel was published in 2023. You can find her writing in Harper’s Bazaar, Kill Your Darlings, Big Issue, Eleven Stories: The Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, Mojo Best of Fiction Anthology, and more. She has a Masters in Publishing and Editing from RMIT. Pip has worked for tech companies in Australia and internationally, including a language learning app and in the not-for-profit space. She has a special interest in inclusive and accessible design. In this work as a UX writer, designer and researcher, she spent her days learning about the thoughts and feelings of people using the internet, and has tried to capture some of those thoughts and feelings in One Story.
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Sheila Fitzpatrick
Sheila Fitzpatrick is a pioneer in the field of Soviet history. She regularly contributes to the London Review of Books and is the multi-award-winning author of many books, including Everyday Stalinism, On Stalin's Team, The Russian Revolution, White Russians, Red Peril and the bestselling The Shortest History of the Soviet Union. Her latest book is The Death of Stalin.
Kathleen Folbigg
Kathleen Folbigg was wrongfully convicted in 2003 of murdering her four infant children. She was pardoned in 2023 after twenty years in prison, following a long campaign for justice by her supporters, and had her convictions overturned on appeal a few months later. She now lives in Newcastle with her rescue dog, Snowie. For the first time, in Inside Out Kathleen lays bare her time in prison, her life before she was wrongfully accused, and her hopes for the future.
Chloe Foster
Chloe Foster is a lifelong horticulturist and gardener. Her career began working in wholesale and retail nurseries, before moving into high-profile horticultural positions with Melbourne Zoo and Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, specialising in the cultivation of hard to grow species. Chloe loves creating engaging gardens and helping people select the ‘right plant for the right place.’ This philosophy spills over into her teaching Horticulture at Melbourne Polytechnic, where she spends her days getting students excited about plants and gardening. She co-hosts the successful 3CR Gardening Show, and loves using her knowledge to educate people through writing and broadcasting.
Adrienne Francis
Adrienne Francis has worked as a radio, television and digital journalist and presenter for ABC Canberra since 2010. She has presented the ABC’s flagship TV and Radio News bulletins in the ACT and Northern Territory and she also worked as a television current affairs reporter for 7.30 ACT. Adrienne spent her early years between Sydney and Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales. She originally studied agricultural science at the University of Sydney before pursuing a media career. She is a garden lover and has previously hosted Saturday Gardening and Saturday Breakfast on 666am, a role that taught her an immense amount about the deep love and passion for plants and gardening in Canberra and surrounds. She is a certified #PlantHoarder!
Kimberley Freeman
Kimberley Freeman was born in London and grew up in Queensland. Freeman is known for her richly detailed historical novels featuring strong female protagonists navigating love, loss, and family secrets across different time periods. She also writes historical fantasy under her real name, Kim Wilkins, and is a Professor of writing and literature at the University of Queensland. Her award-winning novels have been translated into more than 20 languages. Her latest work is The Secret Year of Zara Holt.
Judy Friedlander
Judy Friedlander is a journalist, writer and environmental advocate. She has worn many hats - writing for and editing major newspapers, producing television current affairs, and working as an academic. Judy started and heads up the environmental organisation, PlantingSeeds, which runs the multi-state urban pollinator wildlife corridor, the B&B Highway. She also works with the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney. Educating and working with children, teenagers and adults with PlantingSeeds to plant, do citizen science, and build habitats inspired her book, The Bee Squad: Boosting Biodiversity in your Neighbourhood. The Bee Squad is all about the information and activities that make a difference, to help transform our cities and suburbs into havens for pollinators - and people.
Lisa Fuller
Lisa Fuller is an Eidsvold Murri, living on Ngunnawal and Ngambri lands (Canberra) since 2006. She is a lecturer at the University of Canberra, an award-winning writer, editor, literary agent and mum. Lisa writes children’s literature, short stories, poems and memoir. Her picture book with Samantha Campbell, Big Big Love, recently won the 2025 ACT Literary Award for Children’s Literature (Younger readers). Lisa’s latest book, Washpool, is a middle grade fantasy written for her nieces.
Susannah Fullerton
Susannah Fullerton is the longtime President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia. She has written several books about Jane Austen, including Jane Austen and Crime, A Dance with Jane Austen and Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and also Brief Encounters: Literary Travellers in Australia. Her new book is Great Writers and the Cats who Owned Them. She leads popular literary tours around the world for Australians Studying Abroad.
Emily Gallagher
Emily Gallagher is a historian at the Australian National University. She began her career as a teacher in Sydney before deciding to pursue her passion for history and writing in Canberra. Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood is her first book. She is also a research editor for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and an obsessed soccer player.
Sophie Gee
Sophie Gee is co-host of the Secret Life of Books, an English professor at Princeton University, and is currently the inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney. She is the author of acclaimed fiction and literary criticism, including The Scandal of the Season: a novel; Making Waste and The Barbarous Feast.
Sulari Gentill
Sulari Gentill is the author of the multi-award-winning Rowland Sinclair Mysteries, a series of (currently) ten historical crime novels set in 1930s Australia. Her widely praised standalone novel, After She Wrote Him, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel and was short-listed for the Davitt Award. The Women in the Library was the winner of the crime fiction lover best indie novel 2022 and nominee of the 2023 Edgar Awards – Mary Higgins Clark Award. Sulari lives in a small country town in the Australian Snowy Mountains where she grows French Black Truffles and writes. Her latest novel is Five Found Dead.
Sophie Gilbert
Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and popular culture. She was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and has previously written for The New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Brooklyn Rail. She lives in London. Her latest work is Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.
Sophie Gillies
Sophie Gillies is a children’s author and educator who has taught English and Environmental Education to students aged 5 to 95. Her warm, engaging presentations are enjoyed by children and adults alike. Sophie lives on Ngunnawal Country in Canberra with her partner and twin daughters, and spends as much time as she can outdoors enjoying the landscapes and wildlife of the Canberra region and beyond. Her non-fiction picture book, Wombat Poos are Square, is an entertaining and educational introduction to the wild and whacky poos Australian animals do and the important role poo plays in the environment.
Irma Gold
Irma Gold is an award-winning Australian author, full-time freelance book editor and podcaster based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her books have been published in the US, UK, Canada, South America, Spain, China and Poland. She is the author of two novels, The Breaking and Shift, both of which have received widespread critical acclaim. Irma’s short fiction has been widely published in literary journals, and her acclaimed short fiction collection is Two Steps Forward. She is also the author of five children’s picture books, with another two forthcoming, and is the founder and co-host with Karen Viggers of the writing podcast Secrets from the Green Room.
Ginger Gorman
Ginger Gorman is a multi-award-winning social justice journalist, author and media trainer. Ginger’s bestselling book, Troll Hunting, came out in 2019. Since then, she’s been in demand both nationally and globally as an expert on cyberhate and the real-life harm predator trolling can do. Ginger is currently writing a creative non-fiction book about matriarchy and eldership for Harper Collins called Flying not Falling.
Alyx Gorman
Alyx Gorman is a journalist, editor and author. Born in Canberra, she has worked in fashion and culture media in Melbourne, Sydney, New York and London, and is now lifestyle editor of Guardian Australia. Her debut non-fiction book All Women Want is an intimate, deeply reported exploration of heterosexuality, the pleasure gap and the growth of the sexual wellness industry.
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Madeleine Gray
Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. She has written arts criticism for SRB, Overland, Meanjin, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly and other publications. In 2019 she was a CA-SRB Emerging Critic, and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism, a finalist for the Woollahra Digital Literary Non-fiction award, and a recipient of a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel grant. Madeleine has a PhD in feminist literary theory from the University of Manchester, an MSt in English from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Art History from the University of Sydney. She is the author of the much-acclaimed Green Dot. Her latest novel is Chosen Family.
Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville has published eighteen books. Her nine novels include the bestseller The Secret River (shortlisted for the Booker). Others have also won international and Australian prizes, been adapted for stage and screen, and appear in translation. Her non-fiction includes biographies and books about the writing process. Her latest book is Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place.
Peter Greste
Peter Greste is an award-winning foreign correspondent who spent 25 years working for the BBC, Reuters and Al Jazeera in some of the world’s most volatile places. From Afghanistan to Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, he reported from the frontlines and beyond, although he is best known for becoming a headline himself, when he and two of his colleagues were arrested in Cairo while working for Al Jazeera, and charged with terrorism offences. He has since become a vocal campaigner and advocate for media freedom – a stance that has earned him awards from Britain’s Royal Television Society, the Walkley Foundation, the RSL’s ANZAC Peace Prize, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Human Rights Medal, and the International Association of Press Clubs’ Freedom of Speech Award. He has written about his experiences in Egypt and what he regards as the global war on journalism in his book, The First Casualty. An updated film tie-in edition of this book, The Correspondent, is out now. Peter is Executive Director of the advocacy group Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom and Professor of Journalism at Macquarie University.
Emma Grey
Emma Grey is the award-winning author of seven books including the USA Today and Australian bestsellers, The Last Love Note and Pictures of You, that won the gold medal in the American Independent Publisher Book Awards. She lives in Canberra where her world centres on her children, step-children and grandchildren, photography, music and endlessly chasing the Aurora Australis.
Saul Griffith
Saul Griffith is an engineer and entrepreneur specialising in clean and renewable energy technologies. Over two decades in Silicon Valley, he has founded more than a dozen technology companies. He is the author of three books, including Electrify, The Big Switch, and his most recent release Plug In!. Saul has shifted his focus from his R&D lab, Otherlab, to public policy and advocacy, founding Rewiring America, Rewiring Australia, and Rewiring Aotearoa, non-partisan organisations dedicated to electrification and decarbonisation and the associated policy and regulatory implications of meeting our climate goals.
Andy Griffiths
Andy Griffiths is one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors. His books are published all over the world and include the JUST! books, the Treehouse series and his latest book, illustrated by Bill Hope, You and Me and The Peanut Butter Beast. The Treehouse stories, illustrated by Terry Denton, has been named by The Conversation as among the best Aussie books of the 21st Century.
Madison Griffiths
Madison Griffiths is a writer, artist and producer. She is the author of Sweet Nothings and Tissue. She is also the co-producer of Tender, an award-winning Broadwave podcast that follows what happens in the aftermath of abusive relationships. Her essays have been published widely in The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, The Monthly, SBS Online, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and more. In 2022, she won the Our Watch Award as administered by the Walkley Foundation for Excellence in Reporting on Violence Against Women and Children.
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Bright Sword, which was a Times Notable Book of 2024, and the Magicians trilogy, which has been published in thirty countries and adapted for television. He's also a bestselling children's author (The Silver Arrow), a screenwriter (The Map of Tiny Perfect Things), and an award-winning journalist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, The Week, The Believer, Wired, and many other places. He lives in Sydney with his wife and kids.
Alice Grundy
Alice Grundy is Managing Editor of Australia Institute Press. She has written for The Canberra Times, Griffith Review and The Conversation among others. Her book, Editing Fiction: Three case studies from post-war Australia was published by Cambridge University Press.
Mithila Gupta
Mithila Gupta is a creator, showrunner and writer who has been writing popular Aussie television for over a decade. Her romance series Four Years Later, shot between India and Australia, was produced with Easy Tiger and SBS. It has since been acquired by CBC, Lionsgate India, nominated for Best Mini Series at the AACTA and SPA awards, and won Bronze in the Drama category at the New York Film and Television awards. Her audio series Desi Down Under was released by Audible India globally in 2022. Mithila has also written on Bump, Five Bedrooms, Doctor Doctor, The Heights, Winners and Losers and The Unlisted, which won the Prix Jeunesse International Youth Jury Prize in 2020. She also worked on sci-fi Cleverman and started her career on iconic Neighbours where she introduced an Indian family to the previously all white cast.
Sam Guthrie
Sam Guthrie writes international political thrillers based on his experience working at the nexus of business, politics and international diplomacy. Prior to publishing his first novel, The Peak, Sam had a twenty-five year career in international relations serving as a trade envoy to China, an Asia Pacific corporate affairs adviser and political lobbyist and a senior government official.
Chris Hammer
Chris Hammer is a best-selling, award-winning Australian crime fiction author, creator of the Martin Scarsden and the Ivan Lucic/Nell Buchanan series. His eight novels have been praised for their sense of place, their intricate plots, their colourful characters and their emotional depth. His first book Scrublands was an instant bestseller and winner of the UK Crime Writers Association’s New Blood Dagger. Both it and Silver have been adapted for television, with a third series in development. Formerly a journalist for thirty years, his prize-winning non-fiction book The River (2010) has recently been republished. His latest book, Legacy, was published in October 2025.
Sarah Hanson-Young
Sarah Hanson-Young is Greens Senator for South Australia and is a passionate environmentalist, community campaigner, feminist, and human rights activist. With over 17 years in the Parliament, Sarah has become one of the country's leading voices on women in politics, environmental protection, climate change, media laws and diversity, and human rights policy.
Jane Harper
Jane Harper is the author of the international bestsellers The Dry, Force of Nature, The Lost Man, The Survivors and Exiles. Her books are published in forty territories worldwide, and Jane has won numerous top awards including the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year. The Dry and Force of Nature have been adapted into major motion pictures starring Eric Bana, with The Survivors released as a Netflix series. Jane worked as a print journalist for thirteen years both in Australia and the UK, and now lives in Melbourne with her husband, two children, and two cats.
Eleri Harris
Eleri Harris is an Eisner award-winning cartoonist, journalist and editor working on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country in Australia’s national capital. Her non-fiction history, science and reportage comics have been exhibited and published all over the world. Eleri is the former Features Editor at comics website and magazine, The Nib, and the author of the picture book, A Loo of One’s Own: A Mostly True Tale of Australia’s First Female Parliamentarians. She loves drawing tiny pictures in her studio at Gorman Arts Centre, playing make-believe with her kids and walking in the bush.
Virignia Haussegger
Virginia Haussegger AM is a passionate women’s advocate, and communication specialist with unique expertise in leading powerful conversations. She is also an award-winning television journalist, writer and commentator, whose extensive media career spans 30 years. Virginia has reported from around the globe, including Washington, New York and the Middle East, for leading current affair programs on Channel 9, the Seven Network and the ABC. She has anchored primetime national news programs and presented as state host in five capital cities, including 15 years as nightly anchor of the ABC’s flagship TV News in Canberra. Her latest work is Unfinished Revolution: The feminist fightback.
Jack Heath
Jack Heath is the award-winning author of forty books for children and adults. He was born in Sydney in 1986 and has lived in Canberra since 1996. He wrote his first novel in high school and sold it to a publisher at age 18. After publishing 300 Minutes of Danger, he became a full-time writer. In 2018 his first crime novel for adults, Hangman, was a smash-hit in Australia and has since been translated into French, German, Russian and Serbian. It was voted one of the 101 best books of all time by Dymocks Booklovers, and TV rights were optioned by Disney. Jack's latest adult novel is Kill Your Boss. Jack lives on Ngunnawal/ Ngambri land with his wife, five chickens, three possums, two cats, and a pair of human children.
Wayne Herbert
Wayne Herbert is an author, speaker, and comedian whose work explores identity, disability, and LGBTQIA+ experiences with honesty, humour, and edge. Wayne featured in TEDx Canberra 2017 and is a regular host and international speaker. Wayne shares stories that challenge norms and amplify marginalised voices. His writing and performances blend insight, wit, and lived experience, creating spaces for reflection, laughter, and social impact. Committed to storytelling that sparks conversation, Wayne continues to break barriers and celebrate the intersections of queerness, disability, and resilience.
Kinchem Hegedus
Kinchem Hegedus is a creativity coach, writer, facilitator and ecosystems thinker whose work bridges regenerative design, nature-based creativity and storytelling. Kinchem is the founder of Life at Springfield, a creative retreat space where she has hosted residencies for some of Australia’s most acclaimed authors in partnership with the esteemed The Stella Prize. Her professional background spans venture capital, banking, education and wellness, with international experience in New York, Chicago, Sydney, Singapore and Indonesia. She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing, a Graduate Diploma in Permaculture Design, and a BA in Philosophy. She is the author of Inner Landscaping: Nature's Code for Cultivating Creativity.
Susan Helyar
Susan Helyar hosts a literary salon called Ginsights at Big River Distilling Co. Started in 2022 with local writers it now showcases remarkable writers from all over Australia who share conversation and cocktails with the keen readers of Canberra. Susan loves connecting readers and writers, creating opportunities to explore together what sparks and sustains a literary life. Susan’s recipe for strengthening the literary community in Canberra combines her ethos and insights from a career in social work and social policy with her enduring belief in the power of books to enrich us individually and collectively.
Jess Hill
Jess Hill is an Industry Professor researching gender-based violence at the University of Technology, Sydney. Named marie claire’s 2023 Changemaker of the Year, she is a journalist, author, and educator who has achieved global renown for her ground-breaking work on gendered violence. Her journalism has won many awards, including three Walkley awards. Her first book, See What You Made Me Do, became a bestseller and was awarded the 2020 Stella Prize. Since then, she has written a Quarterly Essay on how #MeToo is changing Australia, made a podcast series on coercive control titled The Trap, and another three-part series on consent, titled Asking For It. Her most recent Quarterly Essay, ‘Losing It' critically analyses Australia's efforts to reduce gender-based violence, and last year, she was appointed to the Australian Government's Rapid Review into Prevention. Jess was a 2024 finalist for Australian of the Year and has spoken at more than 400 events across the country.
Dominic Hoey
Dominic Hoey is a poet, author, youth worker, and small dog owner from Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. He’s released three best-selling novels and written a million love poems. Through his Learn To Write Good program, Dominic has taught thousands of students how to think dyslexic. His third novel, 1985 was released by Penguin books in May and has received rave reviews. He dreams of one day starting an animal rescue farm.
Bill Hope
Bill Hope is an artist and illustrator living in the Blue Mountains just outside of Sydney. Ten years into his career, Bill has established himself as one of the most versatile illustrators and graphic recorders working in the industry. His command of traditional drawing has given him the flexibility to work across a broad range of disciplines from storyboarding to children’s books, live illustration, technical diagrams, editorial and animation. His graphic novel An Interior Life won the Golden Ledger award for Australian Comics. He is here with Andy Griffiths in the brilliantly original children's book You & Me and the Peanut Butter Beast.
Brandon Jack
Brandon Jack played for the Sydney Swans for five years. He is the author of the acclaimed 28: A memoir of football, addiction, art, masculinity and love. His latest novel is Pissants.
Linda Jaivin
Linda Jaivin is a prolific essayist, cultural commentator, literary translator from Chinese specialising in film subtitling, and the internationally published author of thirteen longform publications. These include seven novels, the Quarterly Essay Found in Translation and several works of history. Her Shortest History of China has been translated into two dozen languages. Her latest book, just out this year, is Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China. She is currently working on The Shortest History of Madrid. She lives in Sydney.
Rachael Johns
Rachael Johns was once (briefly) an English teacher, before turning her attention to writing — and never looking back. She now writes award-winning romance and women’s fiction. Her novel The Patterson Girls won the 2016 ABIA for General Fiction, and she’s a two-time winner of the Romance Writers of Australia RUBY Award. Rachael is the co-host of two podcasts: Reading Between Deadlines and Dear Rach & Soph and runs the vibrant Rachael Johns Book Club on Facebook. She lives in the Swan Valley with her husband and two of her three sons. Her latest book is The Lucky Sisters.
Gail Jones
Gail Jones is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. She is the author of two short-story collections and nine novels, and her work has been translated into several languages and has received numerous literary awards. Originally from Western Australia, she now lives in Sydney. Her latest novel is The Name of the Sister.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is Director of the Australian Studies Institute at the Australian National University. This position follows a high-profile journalistic career culminating in six years as chief political correspondent and national affairs editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Canberra Times. He is a fixture on the ABC's Insiders program, Sky News Agenda, and is a sought-after commentator on radio programs across the country. Based in Canberra for nearly two decades, he has reported from locations as diverse as Kandahar and Copenhagen, Bucharest, and Brunei.
Hannah Kent
Hannah Kent's first novel, the award-winning bestseller Burial Rites, has been translated into over 30 languages and is being adapted for film. Her novels The Good People and Devotion, have also been widely translated, shortlisted for numerous awards and are being adapted for film. Her original feature film, Run Rabbit Run, premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Her latest book is Always Home, Always Homesick. Hannah is also the co-founder of Kill Your Darlings. She lives and works on Peramangk and Kaurna country.
Vijay Khurana
Vijay Khurana was co-winner of the Griffith Review Emerging Voices Competition, and his debut novel, The Passenger Seat, was shortlisted for the Novel Prize. His short stories and essays have been published in The Guardian, The Erotic Review, and The Believer, among others. He is currently working on a second novel, as well as an English translation of Senthuran Varatharajah’s German novel Red (Hunger), which will be published by Tilted Axis Press in 2026. He has also been a presenter on radio station triple j, and in 2014 he published a children’s chapter book, Regal Beagle. He lives in Berlin.
Richard King
Richard King is an author and critic and a contributing editor to Arena Quarterly. He is the author of Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? His new book, Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? will be published in October.
Julian Kingma
Julian Kingma is an award-winning photographer whose work is regularly exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Many of his works feature in their permanent collection. His book The Power of Choice was published in May 2025.
Tracey Kirkland
Tracey Kirkland is an Australian news journalist who has worked in broadcast and print for more than thirty years. She is currently the Continuous News Editor in charge of TV and video at ABC News Channel, and was previously the ABC’s national senior newsgathering editor. Since joining the ABC in 1999, Tracey has been a reporter, presenter or producer for all of the public broadcaster’s major news programs. She is the co-editor of Pandemedia: How COVID Changed Journalism. She is co-editor of Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation.
Natalie Kyriacou
Natalie Kyriacou is an award-winning environmentalist, presenter, and charity director on a mission to spark curiosity about the natural world. She is the author of Nature's Last Dance. Natalie was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia and the Forbes 30 Under 30 Honour for her services to wildlife and environmental conservation in 2018. Natalie is the Founder and Chair of My Green World, a Board Director at Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife and CARE Australia, a W20 Delegate (official G20 engagement group), a UNESCO Green Citizens Pathfinder, and she sits on the XPRIZE Global Brain Trust for Biodiversity and Conservation.
Julieanne Lamond
Julieanne Lamond is an Associate Professor of English at the Australian National University. She has published essays on Australian writers including Rosa Praed, Barbara Baynton, Steele Rudd, Miles Franklin and M. Barnard Eldershaw, as well as on gender and literary value, and the history of reading in Australia. She is editor of Australian Literary Studies.
Jeanine Leane
Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from southwest New South Wales. Her poetry, short stories, critique, and essays have been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Westerly, Cordite Review Overland and the Sydney Review of Books. Jeanine has published widely in the areas of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness, literary critique, and creative non-fiction. Jeanine was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonucal Prize for Poetry twice (2017 & 2019). She was the 2019 recipient of the Red Room Poetry Fellowship for her project called Voicing the Unsettled Space: Rewriting the Colonial Mythscape. In 2020 Jeanine edited Guwayu – for all times – a collection of First Nations Poetry commissioned by Red Room Poetry and published by Magabala Books. In 2021 she was the recipient of the School of Literature Art and Media (SLAM) Poetry Prize University of Sydney. In 2023 Jeanine was the winner of the David Harold Tribe Prize for poetry. She also co-edited an anthology of First Nations lyric nonfiction Shapeshifting released by UQP in 2024. She taught Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature at the University of Melbourne from 2016 -2024. Jeanine’s collection of poetry, Gawimarra gathering (UQP 2024) won the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize at the NSW Literary Awards 2025.
Cheng Lei
Cheng Lei is a Chinese Australian journalist working for Sky News. In 2020 while Australia-China relations hit bottom, she was incarcerated for over three years by the Chinese Government on charges of leaking state secrets. Diplomatic efforts led to her release in October, 2023. She was born in China and came to Australia at the age of 10 in 1985. Originally pressured to work in finance, she changed careers to journalism after five years. From 2002 to 2020, she reported on the Chinese economy for CNBC Asia and China Central Television. She received the Press Freedom Award from the Australian Press Council in 2024. Lei's A Memoir of Freedom was published in June 2025.
Melissa Leong
Melissa Leong is a Gold Logie-nominated television presenter and personality, freelance food and travel journalist, food media consultant, radio broadcaster, MC and cookbook editor. She was MasterChef Australia's first female judge and her recent memoir is Guts: A Memoir of Food, Failure and Taking Impossible Chances. She lives in Melbourne but is often found elsewhere.
Devoney Looser
Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is author or editor of twelve books, most recently Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane. Her previous books include Sister Novelists and The Making of Jane Austen. Looser has published essays in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Salon, Slate, The TLS, and The Washington Post, and her series of 24 30-minute lectures on Austen is available through The Great Courses and Audible. In addition to being a quirky Janeite book nerd, Looser has played roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen.
Michael Lucas
Michael Lucas is a screen writer and producer. He’s worked successfully across several genres, from the period drama of The Newsreader, the relationship dramedies of Offspring and Five Bedrooms, the prison thriller of Wentworth, the political drama of Party Tricks, and the comedy of Rosehaven. He has won the AWGIE for ‘Best Television Screenplay’ three times, from six nominations.
John Lyons
John Lyons is an acclaimed journalist and the Global Affairs Editor at the ABC. With over three decades of experience in international journalism, Lyons has reported from some of the world's most turbulent regions, including the Middle East and Ukraine. His insightful reporting has earned him numerous awards, including four prestigious Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism and has twice been named Australian Journalist of the Year. Lyons is known for his deep analysis and compelling storytelling, bringing the human aspects of global conflicts to the forefront. He is the author of Balcony Over Jerusalem, an account of his time in the Middle East covering the Israel-Palestine conflict. His latest work, Bunker in Kyiv based on his three trips to cover the Ukraine War, offers a poignant look into the lives of everyday civilians caught in the crossfire, showcasing their resilience and spirit.
Emma Macdonald
Emma Macdonald is an award-winning former Press Gallery journalist who has moved into the online world where she is Associate Editor of independent Canberra media company HerCanberra. Emma unashamedly loves her hometown and enjoys writing about the people who make it what it is. These are intrinsically more interesting stories than covering federal politics! Emma is also the Canberra Convenor of Women in Media and the co-founder of international maternal health charity Send Hope Not Flowers. In 2022 she was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for "Services to Journalism and to Women".
Raina MacIntyre
Raina MacIntyre is Professor of Global Biosecurity and NHMRC Research Fellow. She heads the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW. Her vaccine expertise is in older adults and immunosuppressed people, and she has done several clinical trials of vaccines in adults and transplant patients. She has served on committees for the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and WHO. She is the founder of EPIWATCH®, an AI system for pandemic early warnings. She has received many awards including the Sir Henry Wellcome Medal and Prize from the Association of Military Surgeons of the US. She is on the editorial boards of BMJ Open and Epidemiology & Infection. She is the author of Dark Winter and Vaccine Nation.
Jenny Macklin
Jenny Macklin is former deputy leader of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, the first woman elected to a leadership position in a major Australian political party. In the Rudd/Gillard governments she was Minister for disability reform, families, housing and community services. As Minister for Indigenous Affairs she oversaw the Apology to the Stolen Generations and developed the Closing the Gap framework. She established Australia’s first national paid parental leave scheme, reformed the pension and led the design and implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. She served as Member for Jagajaga for 23 years.
Emily Maguire
Emily Maguire is the author of seven novels and three non-fiction books. Her novel An Isolated Incident was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and her 2022 book Love Objects was shortlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year. She was the 2018 Writer-in-Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney and the 2023 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. Emily has an MA in literature and works as a mentor to young and emerging writers. Her latest book is the novel, Rapture.
Kim Mahood
Kim Mahood is an award-winning writer and visual artist. She is the author of three works of non-fiction: Craft for a Dry Lake, winner of The Age Book of the Year and the NSW Premier’s prize; Position Doubtful, which received multiple short-listings; and Wandering with Intent, which also won The Age Book of the Year. Her essays are published in art, literary and public affairs journals, and her artwork is held in State, Territory and regional collections. She continues to develop cross-cultural mapping projects with Aboriginal organisations in remote, regional and urban Australia.
Urvi Majumdar
Urvi Majumdar is an AWGIE and AACTA nominated writer and comedian based in Naarm. Urvi was recently successful in receiving ABC X Screen Australia’s highly competitive Freshblood, funding through which she adapted her much loved debut solo comedy show Urvi Went to an All Girls School, into a hit web-series and then a 30-minute pilot, which aired on ABC and ABCiview in April. Previously Urvi has written regularly for Channel Ten’s The Project and ABC’s The Weekly with Charlie Pickering and House of Games. You can see Urvi in the ABC’s critically acclaimed series Fisk, and Guy Montgomery’s Spelling Bee, Channel Ten’s Cheap Seats, SBS’s Celebrity Letters & Numbers and The Cook Up with Adam Liaw and both seasons of Channel 9’s Metrosexual.
Jacqui Malins
Jacqui Malins is a writer, performance poet and visual artist based on Nunnwal and Ngambri country. Jacqui has published two poetry collections, F-Words in 2021, and her new non-fiction verse narrative GERT, set on Tasmania's west coast, in August 2025 (both Recent Work Press), and performed at events including Poetry on the Move, the Woodford Festival and the 2022 National Poetry Month Gala. Jacqui produces, hosts and facilitates arts and literature events, co-founding Canberra's Mother Tongue Multilingual Poetry in 2015, and directing and producing two Poetic City Festivals, in 2021 and 2023.
Jessica Mansour-Nahra
Now an author, Jessica Mansour-Nahra was a communications consultant and writer in Brisbane, London and Sydney, before tree-changing to a hamlet in Wiradjuri country. Jessica holds degrees in history and law from The University of Queensland. The Farm is her first novel.
Venus Mantrap
Curator of Cult Classics at the National Film and Sound Archive, Venus Mantrap is the androgynous construct of artist Samuel Townsend. With roots firmly planted in the world of drag, Mantrap explores aspects of cabaret, performance-art and comedy during live shows. Having delivered two one-person-shows - Life, Love and Lip Syncing and Valley of the Molls - Mantrap has also been a featured artist at Glitterbox, LGBTIQ+ Elders Dance Club and Finucane and Smith's touring show Dancehall and their written work has been published in The Canberra Times. More recently they've facilitated events at the Canberra Writers Festival and delivered a six-part. season at Elsie's Film House.
Walter Marsh
Walter Marsh is a journalist and editor based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, and the author of The Butterfly Thief (Scribe 2025) and Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire (Scribe 2023). A former staff writer and editor at The Adelaide Review and Rip It Up, his writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The Age, and InDaily.
Freya Marske
Freya Marske's debut novel A Marvellous Light was an international bestseller and won the Fantasy Romantic Novel award. She has been nominated for two Hugo awards, and in 2020 won the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. Her hobbies include figure skating and discovering new art galleries, and she is on a quest to try all the gin in the world. Her latest work is Cinder House.
Anna Matilda
Anna Matilda, often referred to as ‘Nanna’ Anna, is a permaculture educator and founder of The Urban Nanna, an educational business which specialises in teaching people about traditional skills, crafts and methods of living. ‘Nanna’ Anna is a former primary teacher with training in horticulture, psychology and fine arts. Through TV, radio, events, and print media, she shares traditional knowledge and skills with people around the world, much like grandmas used to do with their children and grandchildren. As well as reviving traditional ways of cooking, preserving, and crafting, Anna’s focus lies heavily on permaculture and sustainable living, where gardening and zero-waste principles are part of everyday life. Her new internationally released book, Everyday Permaculture, has already been a huge success, with extracts featured in Women’s Weekly, ABC Organic Gardener, Good Food Guide, and Frankie Magazine. Anna was also included in Better Homes & Gardens’ inaugural Creator Awards.
Alice Matthews
Alice Matthews is the host of Afternoons on 666 ABC Radio Canberra, home of the popular Book Corner segment. She’s also been a presenter and producer at triple j, ABC Pacific and SBS TV. Alice was the 2015 recipient of the Young Walkley Award for Radio and has collaborated on several international United Nations research projects focusing on disinformation and protection of journalists’ sources. She lives on Ngunnawal country with her husband and daughter (as well as two dogs, six chickens and too many fruit trees).
Thomas Mayo
Thomas Mayo is an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander man, assistant National Secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia and author of seven books about First Nations history and justice. Several of his books have been shortlisted for awards and the Voice to Parliament Handbook, co-authored with Kerry O'Brien, was voted 2024 Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards. His latest book, Always Was, Always Will Be is a guide for Australians (whether they voted yes or no) to what is next, after the 2023 Voice Referendum failed to pass. The book shares why people can have hope and inspiration for a better future.
Cassie McCullagh
Cassie McCullagh co-hosts The Bookshelf with Kate Evans on ABC Radio National, a weekly review of the latest Australian and international fiction. Cassie is also presenter of The Books That Changed Us, ABC RN’s series on landmark books of the 20th century, and Best of the Festivals which highlights of Australia’s literary and specialist festivals. Cassie has also presented ABC Sydney’s Focus program, and ABC RN’s Life Matters, and reported on books, arts and popular culture. Prior to joining the ABC, Cassie worked in print journalism as a feature writer, news reporter and columnist.
Jasmin McGaughey
Jasmin McGaughey is a Torres Strait Islander and African American writer working at Books+Publishing. She is the author of Moonlight and Dust and Ash Barty’s Little Ash Series. She has written for Overland, Kill Your Darlings, SBS Voices and Griffith Review.
Karen Middleton
Karen Middleton is a Canberra-based political journalist and author. Her first book, An Unwinnable War - Australia in Afghanistan, charts the political backstory to Australia's commitment to the Afghan conflict and was published in 2011. Her 2016 biography, Albanese - Telling it Straight, revealed the personal story of the man who went on to become Australia's 31st Prime Minister and is being updated this year.
Kate Mildenhall
Kate Mildenhall is the author of three novels - Skylarking, The Mother Fault and The Hummingbird Effect. The Hummingbird Effect was longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize and shortlisted for the 2024 ABIA literary Fiction Book of the year. In 2024 she released her first children’s book To Stir with Love illustrated by Jess Racklyeft, shortlisted for the 2025 Indie Book Awards and the 2025 ABIA Children’s Book of the Year, and Notable in the CBCA Book Awards for Early Readers. Her latest novel is The Hiding Place. For six years Kate co-hosted The First Time podcast interviewing hundreds of writers including Tim Winton, Helen Garner, Richard Flanagan, George Saunders and Charlotte Wood.
Jennifer Mills
Jennifer Mills is an author, editor and critic based in Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide). Known for imaginative climate fiction and bold experimentation, her books include The Airways and Dyschronia, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Mills is a widely published essayist, an advocate for the rights of writers and artists, an MEAA freelance delegate, Deputy Chair of the Australian Society of Authors, and a current SA Literary Fellow. Her latest novel is Salvage.
Steven MinOn
Steve MinOn was an internationally awarded advertising copywriter and a restaurateur before becoming a writer of fiction. He grew up in North Queensland and he now lives in Meanjin/Brisbane. Steve has written often about outsiders and his family’s mixed-race ancestral history, and his articles and short stories have been published in SBS Voices, Mamamia and various anthologies. He won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer in the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards for First Name Second Name.
Casey Mulder
Casey Mulder is a Ballardong Noongar educator, writer and editor from Quairading. She works with a wide range of publishing companies, such as HarperCollins, Audible, UWA Publishing, Night Parrot Press, Allen & Unwin, Affirm Press, Simon and Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette, Fremantle Press and Magabala Books. She is the Director of First Nations Writing and Programs at the Centre for Stories and is currently working on a creative non-fiction manuscript. Casey takes joy in supporting mob to tell our stories in our ways.
Omar Musa
Omar Musa is an author, visual artist and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He has released one novel, four books of poetry (including Killernova), five hip-hop records, and an acclaimed one man play, Since Ali Died. His work has appeared in The Best Australian Stories and Best of Australian Poems. His debut novel, Here Come the Dogs, was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Miles Franklin Award. He was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015. He has had several solo exhibitions of his woodcuts, including his most recent collection All My Memories Are Mistranslations. His latest novel is Fierceland. He is based between Borneo and Brooklyn.
Lucy Nelson
Lucy Nelson is an award-winning writer of fiction and part time arts worker living on unceded Dharawal Country. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Big Issue, Southword and elsewhere. She has received the Newcastle Short Story Award, the Writing NSW Varuna Fellowship and the Templeberg Fellowship from Writers Victoria. She studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT in Melbourne and her first book Wait Here was published by Summit Books, Simon & Schuster in June 2025.
Caroline Overington
Caroline Overington is the editor of the Books pages in The Weekend Australian. She has twice won the Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism; she has also won the Sir Keith Murdoch award for Journalistic Excellence; the Blake Dawson Prize; and the Davitt Award for crime writing. She has written sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction.
Stephanie Owen Reeder
Stephanie Owen Reeder is the author of over 25 books for children. Books in her Heritage Heroes series of historical novels have won the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier's History Award. She also writes award-winning nonfiction picture books about the environment. Stephanie has worked as a Hansard Editor at Federal Parliament, and as a teacher, a librarian and an academic. She is an ambassador for both the ACT Chief Minister's Reading Challenge and the 80th Anniversary of the CBCA, and she has also won a CBCA award for distinguished service to children's literature.
Alli Parker
Alli Parker is a Japanese-Australian author and screenwriter, with a background in script editing and script co-ordinating. Her debut novel, the bestselling At the Foot of the Cherry Tree, was based on the true story of Australia's first Japanese war bride, who was Alli's grandmother. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Dymocks Book of the Year and the 2024 ABIA Matt Richell Award for New Writers and longlisted for the 2024 Indie Book Awards. Her credits as a script editor and co-ordinator include Irreverent, Jack Irish series 1, 2 & 3, Shantaram, Secret Bridesmaids' Business, Ms Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries, Ride Like a Girl, Please Like Me and Utopia. Her latest novel is Until the Red Leaves Fall.
Zoya Patel
Zoya Patel is the author of two books, No Country Woman and Once A Stranger. She is the former editor of Lip Magazine, and founded literary journal Feminartsy, where she published and mentored emerging writers from 2014 - 2018. She has also worked in strategic communications for a decade, dedicating her career to not-for-profits.
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Emma Pei Yin
Emma Pei Yin is an Australian Chinese writer and editor. Her debut novel, When Sleeping Women Wake, has been published globally, translated into multiple languages and was longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize (2025). She is also the founder of yinfluence editorial, an agency that works with PoC, queer and neurodivergent writers, connecting them with editors and mentors who understand the stakes of telling stories from the margins. She has been featured in The Canberra Times, The Australian, Mekong Review, Being Asian Australian, The Hong Kong Review, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar & more. Emma is working on her second novel with her extremely barky dachshund, lady, by her side.
Tim Pocock
Tim Pocock is an Australian actor, producer, musician and advocate originally from Johannesburg, South Africa. An award-winning pianist and singer, Tim began his career on the Sydney Opera House stage at a young age, before embarking on a successful career in the film and television industry. With credits including X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Home and Away, the multi-Logie-winning series Dance Academy and three-time AACTA-nominated film Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism, for which he also served as executive producer, Tim also stars in the upcoming noir thriller Body Blow, set for release in 2025. In recent years, Tim has set his sights on advocating for the LGBTIQ+ community, speaking out on institutionalised homophobia and playing an active part in recent legislative changes made in the NSW Parliament's criminalisation of conversion therapy practices. His memoir is The Truth Will Set You Free.
David Pocock
Having migrated from Zimbabwe with his family as a teenager, David Pocock went on to captain the Wallabies and vice-vaptain the Brumbies as part of a stellar rugby career in which he has been recognised for leadership on and off the field. With a Masters in Sustainable Agriculture, David also has a track record as a powerful advocate on issues ranging from climate to marriage equality. He has been involved in multiple small businesses and has co-founded numerous not-for-profit community initiatives in Australia and overseas, including with his wife Emma. In 2021, David attended the COP26 climate summit and led The Cool Down campaign that saw over 470 Australian athletes from 40+ sports call on the Australian Government to lift its ambition on climate change. Upon returning home, he announced his run as the community-endorsed Independent Senate candidate for the ACT. After campaigning on a platform of integrity, doing politics differently and making Canberra count, David was successfully elected at the 21 May 2022 Federal Election and recently returned to Parliament as Independent Senator for the ACT.
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Lucinda Price
Lucinda Price (aka Froomes) is a writer, broadcaster and comedian. Her debut book, All I Ever Wanted Was To Be Hot, is a funny, provocative retrospective on the last thirty years of Western beauty standards. An instant best-seller, it won an Australian Book Industry Award for Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year. Price was also nominated for the 2025 Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year.
Sally Pryor
As features editor at The Canberra Times, Sally Pryor loves telling people things they didn't know - or even things they've always known - about Canberra. A long time booklover, she is passionate about supporting great writers from Canberra and beyond.
Eric Puchner
Eric Puchner is the author of the novel Model Home, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of a California Book Award, and two collections of short stories. His fiction and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, Tin House, Best American Short Stories and more. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Eric lives in Baltimore with his wife, novelist Katharine Noel, and their two children. His latest work is Dream State.
Natasha Rai
Natasha Rai is a writer and somatic counsellor. She is also the co-host of the Book Deal podcast, exploring writers' publication journeys. Her debut novel, An Onslaught of Light, published by Pantera Press, was longlisted for the 2017 Richell Prize, 2018 KYD Unpublished Manuscript award, and highly commended for the 2022 Ultimo Press/Westwords Prize. Natasha’s nonfiction appears in anthologies on gender violence. Her short fiction appears in Mascara Literary Review, Overland, Verity La, and StylusLit.
Helly Raichura
Helly Raichura's story is just as interesting as her food. In a past life, the chef from Gujarat, India, was an HR advisor for an IT company – until she quit her job to pursue her love of cooking and started offering intimate dinners out of her home. Guests had to enter via her laundry, and so Enter Via Laundry was born. There, Helly created shared meals that took guests on a culinary journey through regional India. One of the first chefs to introduce and popularise regional Indian cuisine in Australia, Helly quickly gained a following, and she featured on MasterChef Australia to much acclaim. Preserving India's culture through cuisine, and showcasing its regionality on a plate, is Helly's passion. She now has a permanent venue for Enter via Laundry in the inner city of Melbourne. Never losing sight of her Indian heritage, she creates menus that educate guests on the history and seasonality of each dish. She has recently published The Food of Bharat: A Chef's Journey through India's Rich Culinary History.
Jane Rawson
Jane Rawson is an essayist, novelist and editor who writes about nature, culture and power. Her most recent book is Human/Nature: On Life in a Wild World, and her novels include A History of Dreams (Brio 2022) and From the Wreck (Transit Lounge 2017). She is the Editorial Manager of Tasmanian literary magazine, Island.
Amy Remeikis
Amy Remeikis is a political analyst, journalist and author, as well as Australia's most popular political blogger. She is Chief Political Analyst at The Australia Institute.
Darren Rix
Darren Rix, a Gunditjmara-GunaiKurnai man with Ngarigo bloodlines, grew up in the tin huts and tents of ‘Silver City’, South Nowra, with his eleven siblings. His family later got their first house in the Bega Valley, and he attended school in Bega. At fourteen, Darren moved to Ngunnawal country – Canberra – to which he has songline ties through his Ngarigo bloodlines. He has worked as a radio reporter for the Brisbane Indigenous Media Association, and with the Ngunnawal people as a cultural sites officer in Canberra. Darren is an accomplished musician, as was his uncle, Archie Roach. He has appeared in the TV program Rake. Darren has six children and twelve grandchildren. He is the co-author of Warra Warra Wai.
Heather Rose
Heather Rose is the Australian author of nine novels. Her recent novel, Bruny, won the 2020 ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year Award. Her seventh novel, The Museum of Modern Love, won the 2017 Stella Prize and the 2017 Christina Stead Prize. It has been published internationally and translated into numerous languages. Both The Museum of Modern Love and The Butterfly Man were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. The Butterfly Man won the Davitt Award in 2006, and in 2007 The River Wife won the international Varuna Eleanor Dark Fellowship. The series has been published internationally and shortlisted twice for the Aurealis Awards for best children's fantasy. The memoir Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here was shortlisted for the nonfiction prize in the 2022 Indie Book Awards and the Tasmanian Premier’s Prize in 2025. Heather lives in Tasmania. Her new novel is A Great Act of Love.
Josephine Rowe
Josephine Rowe is the author of three story collections and two novels, including A Loving, Faithful Animal. She has twice been named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, and her story collection Here Until August was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Rowe’s writing has appeared in Granta, HEAT, McSweeny’s Quarterly, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, and elsewhere. In 2021-2022 she was a research fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and is an inaugural 2024 Ian Potter Creative Fellow. Her new novel is Little World.
Em Rusciano
Em Rusciano is a writer, singer, keynote speaker, comic and podcaster. Her podcast Emsolation was Australia’s first ever Spotify Exclusive, and her 15-date Outgrown comedy tour took Australia by storm in 2024. Em’s 2016 bestselling book Try Hard was released to acclaim, and her self-narrated audiobook was nominated for ABIA Audiobook of the Year. Em has a fierce, loud and passionately loyal social media community, with a combined following on Facebook and Instagram of more than half a million.
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Amin Saikal
Amin Saikal, AM, FASSA, is emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at ANU, adjunct professor of social sciences at University of Western Australia, and Vice Chancellor's strategic fellow at Victoria University. His latest books are: How to Lose a War: The story of America's intervention in Afghanistan; Iran Rising: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic; and Islam Beyond Borders: The Umma in world politics - co-author. He is also a frequent contributor to major national and international dailies, TV and radio networks, including BBC and the ABC.
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Sita Sargeant
Sita Sargeant is a social entrepreneur and author promoting gender equality through tourism. She founded She Shapes History to show that women have always shaped history – and to make their stories easier to find, connect with, and remember. Through walking tours, digital content, events, and now her book, She Shapes History offers a gateway into a richer, more inclusive understanding of Australia’s past. She Shapes History currently runs tours in Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne. Sita’s book, She Shapes History: Walks & Stories About Great Australian Women, brings these stories to life across 31 towns and cities.
Toby Schmitz
Toby Schmitz is a writer, director and actor. He was most recently seen on television in Boy Swallows Universe and on stage in Gaslight. He has received nominations for his performances in The Seagull, Thyestes, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Ruben Guthrie and The Great, and his television credits include The Twelve and Black Sails. Toby is also a celebrated playwright. His plays include Degenerate Art, I Want to Sleep with Tom Stoppard and Capture the Flag. He was awarded the Patrick White Award for his play Lucky. His debut novel The Empress Murders was published in 2025.
Anupam Sharma
Anupam Sharma is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and film entrepreneur. With a postgraduate thesis on Indian cinema and over 430 screen projects to his credit, he has been widely credited for pioneering modern ties between the Australian and Indian film industries, taking him to one of the top fifty most powerful and influential Australian film professionals list by Encore. His work includes the feature film unINDIAN, Brand Bollywood Downunder and writing/directing a number of high-profile ad campaigns. Anupam also launched the Australian Film Initiative, promoting Australian films in India, with supporters including Hugh Jackman and Baz Luhrmann, among others. He has been appointed an Australia Day Ambassador for his diverse initiatives, which include the first and only National Indian Film Festival of Australia, the Australia India Film Council, and the Australia India Film Fund. He continues to advise major screen bodies, speaking on diversity, while developing a diverse slate of international projects with development investment from Screen Australia, Screen NSW, Screen Queensland, and others.
Beejay Silcox
Beejay Silcox is a book critic. Her work appears in high-profile publications across three continents, and is renowned for its resolute (some might say, foolhardy) honesty. She has been described as “the most significant new Australian critic in decades”. In addition to her literary and cultural commentary, Beejay works as a professional reader: she’s an interviewer, prize judge, editor, award-winning creative writing educator and the former Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival.
Craig Silvey
Craig Silvey is an author and screenwriter from Fremantle, Western Australia. His bestselling novel, Jasper Jones, was released in 2009 and is considered a modern Australian classic. Published in over a dozen territories, Jasper Jones has won plaudits in three continents, including an International Dublin Literary Award shortlisting, a Michael J. Printz Award Honor, and a Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlisting. Honeybee was published in 2019 and won Best Fiction for the Indie Book Awards 2021 and Dymocks Book of the Year 2020. His much-loved family favourite Runt was published in 2022 and has won multiple awards including Dymocks Book of the Year for Younger Readers 2022, Best Children's Book and Book of the Year at the Indie Book Awards 2023, Book of the Year: Younger Readers at the CBCA Awards 2023, Children's Book of the Year at the Book People Book of the Year Awards 2023, and Book of the Year for Younger Children at the Australian Book Industry Awards 2023. Runt was adapted into a critically and commercially successful film in 2024. Runt and the Diabolical Dognapping is his latest work.
Alex Sloan
Alex Sloan AM has been a journalist for over 35 years, including over 27 years as a broadcaster with the ABC. In 2017 Alex was named Canberra Citizen of the Year. Alex was also made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2019 for her significant service to the community of Canberra, and to the broadcast media as a radio presenter. At the national level, Alex is deputy chair of leading progressive think tank The Australia Institute, a director of The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and is a regular interviewer as part of the ANU Meet the Author series. Since 2020 Alex has worked as a pro bono advisor with key indigenous leaders Pat Anderson AO and Professor Megan Davis AC.
Melinda Smith
Melinda Smith is a poet, editor, teacher, arts advocate and event curator based in Canberra. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winner Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call. Her work appears nationally and internationally in literary journals and has been widely anthologised and translated. She frequently collaborates with artists in other disciplines including dancers, musicians and visual artists, and is also a former poetry editor of The Canberra Times. Her latest books are Goodbye, Cruel and the chapbook Listen, bitch with artist Caren Florance.
Fred Smith
Fred Smith is the kind of artist only Canberra could produce. Diplomat, songwriter, poet and author, he was recently awarded an Order of Australia for services to an improbable combination of music and foreign affairs. Fred was the first Australian diplomat to be posted to Uruzgan Province in 2009, and the last to leave in 2013. His job was to comprehend the complex web of tribal and patronage networks that made things tick. He came to see the province through Afghan eyes, as well as those of the soldiers he worked with. He turned these experiences into a highly acclaimed album of songs called Dust of Uruzgan and then a memoir The Dust of Uruzgan, which was described by Channel 10 Political Editor Hugh Riminton as “as convincing a picture as we will ever have of the tragedy, hope, oddness and courage of Australia’s Uruzgan enterprise…an astonishingly vibrant piece of reportage from the heart of our longest war.” He returned to Afghanistan in 2020 to work in the Australian Embassy during what turned out to be the final year of the Afghan Republic. His latest memoir, The Sparrows of Kabul, documents his experiences working on the frantic evacuation of Kabul.
Barrina South
Barrina South is a Barkindji woman living on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. As well as being an emerging poet, she is a visual artist and academic committed to Aboriginal women’s autobiographical narratives. She has facilitated several workshops on her visual art and academic research. Her recent work Makarra is the Winner ACT Literary Awards 2025, Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2025, Shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award 2025, Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award 2025 and Highly Commended in the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
David Speers
David Speers is the ABC's national political lead and host of Insiders on ABC TV. Every Sunday morning, David Speers unpacks the major stories shaping Australia's future. Each episode includes an interview with an Australian politician and an extensive discussion with a panel of the country's best journalists.
Quentin Sprague
Quentin Sprague is the author of The Stranger Artist, which won the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction, and a monograph on the late Australian painter Ken Whisson. His art criticism appears widely, including regularly in The Monthly, as well as in monographs and exhibition catalogues published by the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. He has worked variously as a curator, an academic, an art coordinator and an artist, and lives in Canberra, on Ngunnawal Country. His latest work is What Artists See.
David Stavanger
David Stavanger is poet, performer, cultural producer, editor, and former psychologist living on Dharawal land in Port Kembla. His first full-length poetry collection, The Special, was awarded several prizes. David is the co-editor of Solid Air: Collected Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word and Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health, which received a NSW Mental Health Arts & Media Award. Case Notes won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and his new collection is The Drop Off. David also works as an Artistic Director at Red Room Poetry. He is also known for his work with several community writing projects that amplify marginalised voices and lived experience writers including Brotherhood of the Wordless (writers with autism precluded from speech) and as the producer of MAD Poetry (writers with lived mental health experience).
Lachlan Strahan
Lachlan Strahan is a historian and former diplomat. Across a 30-year diplomatic career, he was involved in grappling with some of Australia’s biggest international challenges, from managing China’s rise, growing a relationship with India at a tense time, and handling the repercussions of Beijing’s security agreement with Solomon Islands, to tackling climate change, countering weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, defending human rights and coordinating the search for MH370. Lachlan is the author of Australia’s China, Day of Reckoning, and Justice in Kelly Country, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Prime Minister’s Award for History. His latest work is The Curious Diplomat to be launched at The Canberra Writers Festival
Diana Thorp
Diana Thorp is a journalist, lecturer, tutor and teacher. Diana has worked for The Australian, including its weekend magazine, and enjoyed some time writing for The Times in London. She also taught journalism at universities in Melbourne and currently teaches English and History at a girls’ school. Diana has an arts degree majoring in Australian history and gender studies, and her honours thesis concentrated on women in ancient Egyptian literature. In writing Code of Silence: How Australian Women Helped Win the War, Diana has used her journalist’s eye for a good story, her passion for history and its missing pieces, and her teacher’s empathy.
Gabrielle Tozer
Gabrielle Tozer is an award-winning author based in regional New South Wales. Her latest works include The Unexpected Mess of it All, which won the 2025 ACT Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction, and beloved picture book Before We Met (illustrated by the award-winning Sophie Beer). Over the years, Gabrielle has received honours including the State Library of Victoria’s Gold Inky Award for her debut novel, The Intern, and appeared on the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Notable List for Older Readers for Remind Me How This Ends. Gabrielle is currently working on three new books for HarperCollins.
Jennifer Trevelyan
With a background in photography and children’s publishing, Jennifer Trevelyan undertook an MA in creative writing at the Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2022. She is now a full-time writer - A Beautiful Family is her first book. When not at her writing desk, Jennifer can usually be found in the garden.
Spiri Tsintziras
Spiri Tsintziras has been writing about food, family and connection for over 30 years. Her mother has inspired many stories, most recently on SBS online. Spiri is the author of the memoirs My Ikaria: How the People From a Small Mediterranean Island Inspired Me to Live a Happier, Healthier and Longer Life and Afternoons in Ithaka. She co-authored, with Myfanwy Jones, the award-winning and internationally acclaimed Parlour Games for Modern Families. Her stories and articles have been published in anthologies, newspapers, and online. Spiri trained as a social worker and freelance journalist. She has worked in publications and communications roles in public health for over twenty years while running her own communications business. For nearly a decade, she has taught professional writing at Swinburne University. She lives with her family in Melbourne. Her latest work is Twelve Golden Gifts.
Sasha Vey
Sasha Vey is an Australian author who enjoys writing about the everyday dramas of teenagers experiencing the (often messy) transition into young adulthood. Sasha's debut novel, The Set-Up Girl, is a YA romantic comedy. When not writing or working, Sasha can be found on the piano or resisting the urge to start another crafting project.
Karen Viggers
Karen Viggers is a novelist, veterinarian, adventurer and co-host of the Secrets From the Green Room podcast. She is the author of five internationally bestselling novels: The Stranding, The Lightkeeper’s Wife, The Grass Castle, The Orchardist’s Daughter and Sidelines. Karen lives and works in Canberra with her ecologist husband. When she’s not hiking or caring for animals (both domestic and wild), she’s either reading or writing.
Madeleine Watts
Madeleine Watts is the author of the novels Elegy, Southwest and The Inland Sea, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The Believer, The Baffler, and HEAT, among others. Originally from Sydney, and after a decade in New York, she currently lives in Berlin
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Don Watson
Don Watson is the author of many acclaimed books, including Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, American Journeys, The Bush, Watsonia, Death Sentence, and The Passion of Private White, as well as three Quarterly Essays on American culture and politics. His latest book, The Shortest History of the United States of America, will be published 18 November 2025.
Jana Wendt
Jana Wendt is a journalist and writer. Her feature writing has appeared in a broad range of publications and she has worked for every Australian television network as a senior reporter and presenter, and as a contributing correspondent for the American CBS Network’s 60 Minutes. Wendt has interviewed many key newsmakers, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Muammar Gaddafi, Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black, Benazir Bhutto, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Yasser Arafat. In the arts, her subjects have included pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim; opera star Cecilia Bartoli; writer Norman Mailer and jazz diva Cleo Laine. Jana Wendt has published two books of non-fiction. The Far Side of the Moon is her first book of fiction.
Amanda Whitley
Amanda Whitley is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of HerCanberra, the capital’s leading lifestyle media brand that aims to connect Canberrans with their city and each other. Founded in 2011 after her premature daughter's birth led to a career change, HerCanberra has grown from a spare bedroom startup to attract over 180,000 monthly readers and a social media following of more than 130,000. Amanda was named ACT Woman of the Year in 2016. She now heads Coordinate's Content and Communications Division, incorporating HerCanberra. When not building community connections, she enjoys Zumba, food, and spending time with her family.
Marian Wilkinson
Marian Wilkinson is a multi-award-winning journalist with a career that has spanned radio, television and print. She has covered politics, national security, refugee issues and climate change as well as serving as a foreign correspondent in Washington DC for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She was a Deputy Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Executive Producer of the ABC’s Four Corners program and a senior reporter with Four Corners. She is the author of several books including the political biography The Fixer, on former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson, Dark Victory, on Australia’s response to asylum seekers which she co-authored with David Marr, and The Carbon Club on Australia’s fraught climate policy. Her latest work is the Quarterly Essay, Woodside Vs. the Planet, on Australia’s gas industry and climate change.
Lili Wilkinson
Lili Wilkinson is the award-winning author of more than twenty books for young people, including A Hunger of Thorns, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and was a CBCA Honour Book. Lili has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, and is a passionate advocate for YA and the young people who read it. Her latest books are the Bravepaw series and Unhallowed Halls.
Michael Williams
Michael Williams is the editor of The Monthly. He was previously the Artistic Director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne as its founding Head of Programming in 2009 and then as its Director from September 2011. A regular host and interviewer for literary and ideas events around Australia – including a long-standing association with the Sydney Writers’ Festival – his background is in publishing and broadcasting. He has hosted two shows on ABC Radio National – Blueprint for Living (2015–2016) and Talkfest (2017–2018) – was a regular on ABC TV’s The Book Club, and remains a regular guest on ABC radio and TV. Michael has also worked as a Breakfast presenter for Melbourne’s 3RRR, as a member of the Australia Council’s Literature Board, in publishing in Australia and New York and has written extensively for The Guardian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and elsewhere. He is currently also host of Guardian Australia’s monthly book club.
Rhiân Williams
Rhiân Williams was almost three when she came to Australia, from a place of songs and dragons. Here - home to the world’s longest continuing storytelling tradition - is where her imagination and her heart have grown up. When not wrestling with rhymes and stories that aren’t completely certain of how they want to be told, Rhiân can often be found helping turtles cross the road, trying to film endangered freshwater fish or singing sea shanties. Rhiân believes in the power of stories - beautifully told and in our own extraordinary and diverse voices - to change the world, for the better, for us all!
Kyle Williams
Kyle Wilson graduated from the ANU with First Class Honours in Russian in 1976. He studied at Moscow and Leningrad State Universities (1977-79). He taught Russian at the University of Queensland before joining the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs in 1981. He had postings in Warsaw (1982-84), Moscow (1988-92) and Beijing (1995-2000). He studied Polish in Lublin and Krakow; and Mandarin at the Beijing Institute of Economics and Management. From 2000 to 2003 he headed DFAT’s China Political and Bilateral Section. From 2003 to 2013 he was seconded to the Office of National Assessments as the Senior Analyst for Russia and the Former Soviet Union. Wilson has served as official Russian interpreter for Australian heads of state, prime ministers and ministers. Since retiring from DFAT and ONA he has been a Visiting Fellow at the ANU’s Centre for European Studies.
Kaya Wilson
Kaya Wilson is writer, tsunami scientist, and lover of all things ocean who somehow finds himself living in Canberra. Their first book, As Beautiful As Any Other was listed by The Guardian as one of the best books of 2021 and shortlisted for 2022 ACT Book of the Year. Their second book, a queer coming of age novel, Romeo: A Tale of Four Jumps, is in submission.
Cam Wilson
Cam Wilson is a Walkley Award-nominated technology reporter who covers the intersection between internet culture, online extremism and politics. He’s currently Crikey’s Associate Editor, and writes The Sizzle newsletter. Previously he's worked at the ABC, BuzzFeed News, Business Insider and Gizmodo. He has been published in The Guardian, Slate, The Sydney Morning Herald and elsewhere. Cam's recent work is Conspiracy Nation.
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Briony Winchester
Briony Winchester is a journalist, columnist and storyteller who writes like your funniest and most excited mate in the group chat. Known for her sharp wit, unapologetic voice and deep love of Queanbeyan (and Canberra, obvs), Briony writes local yarns that blend cultural commentary with nostalgic flair and emotional truth. A former lifestyle editor of The Canberra Times, Briony’s stories have been widely published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and in New Zealand and the UK. Her first children’s book Holly Asks Her Heart is due for release later this year and an erotic fiction novel set in - wait for it - Bunnings (!) is in the works.
Susan Wyndham
Susan Wyndham is a writer, journalist and former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. She is the author of Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower, a biography of the elusive Australian novelist, published by NewSouth in October 2025.
Anne-Marie Te Whiu
Anne-Marie Te Whiu is a poet, editor, weaver and cultural producer. Her debut poetry collection is titled Mettle. Most recently she edited Woven and previously More Than These Bones, Whisper Songs and she co-edited Solid Air: Australia & New Zealand Spoken Word. She has been awarded several residencies and fellowships including the Australia Council Individual Projects Fellowship, Neilma Sidney Travel Fund, The Next Chapter Fellowship and The Next Chapter Alumni Fellowship.
The Writers Formerly Known As
The Writers Formerly Known as... are Scott O’Çlock, your classic raconteur and verbal pest; and Robyn Pfitzner, practioner, coach, and health and wellness writer, including co-author of Treating Fever without Fear. After a wet road trip to Kosciusko, and taking inspiration from obscure sitcoms like DAAS Kapital, Britain’s Spaced, and Canadia’s Letterkenny, and being mentored by comedy legend Tim Ferguson, Once Upon a Time In Australia spewed forth. A Road Trip RomCom screenplay completed, a couple of screenwriting awards followed, and the stories didn’t stop there, with W.I.P’s Fondue Night, Milk Run and The Cross, sexiness ensues…
Qin Qin
Qin Qin is a writer, literary festival organiser and librarian. She now embraces the power of stories to heal and unite -- but it wasn’t always the case. Born in Southwest China and raised in Canberra, she felt pressure to be a ‘good’ migrant daughter. By 29 she was a unfulfilled overachiever with four degrees working for the UN. After one too many crises, she veered off-script. Her debut memoir Model Minority Gone Rogue was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year, 2025 and reveals the liberating non-linear journey to choose love over fear.