Notes on Contributors

THE EDITOR

Anna Goldsworthy is the author of Piano Lessons, Welcome to Your New Life and the Quarterly Essay Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny. Her writing has appeared in the Monthly, the Age, the Australian, the Adelaide Review and The Best Australian Essays. Described by the Australian as a ‘musical ambassador,’ she is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and versatile musicians. As a piano soloist, she has performed extensively throughout Australia and internationally, and as a chamber musician she is a founding member of Seraphim Trio.

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Adams writes about humans and nature. His work is published in Meanjin, Australian Book Review, the Guardian and academic journals and books. He teaches in human geography at the University of Wollongong. ‘Salt Blood’ won the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad is the founder and director of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement. He is the award-winning author of The Tribe (Giramondo, 2014). Mohammed’s forthcoming novel is The Lebs (Hachette, 2018).

Lech Blaine is a writer from Toowoomba. He was an inaugural winner of a Griffith Review Writing Fellowship. In 2017 he received the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. Black Inc. will publish his first book, Car Crash: A Memoir, in 2019.

Shannon Burns is a writer and critic from Adelaide.

John Clarke (29 July 1948 – 9 April 2017) was a New Zealand–born comedian, writer, and satirist. He was born in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and lived in Australia from the late 1970s. He was a highly regarded actor and writer whose work appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in both radio and television and also in print.

J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940. He has published sixteen works of fiction, as well as several volumes of criticism. In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since 2002 he has lived in Adelaide.

Richard Cooke is a writer, broadcaster and contributing editor to the Monthly.

Anwen Crawford is the Monthly’s music critic and the author of Live Through This (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Nick Feik is the editor of the Monthly magazine.

Tim Flannery is an environmentalist. In 2007 he was named Australian of the Year. He delivered the 2002 Australia Day Address to the nation. In 2013 he founded the Australian Climate Council, Australia’s largest and most successful crowd-funded organisation. His latest book is Sunlight and Seaweed (Text Publishing, 2017).

Helen Garner’s most recent book is Everywhere I Look (Text Publishing, 2017).

Moreno Giovannoni emigrated from San Ginese at the age of two. A translator and writer who has been published in the Age, Island, Southerly, and The Best Australian Essays 2014 he was the inaugural winner of the Deborah Cass Prize. Black Inc. will publish Tales of San Ginese in 2018.

Stan Grant is Indigenous Affairs editor for the ABC and Chair of Indigenous Affairs at Charles Sturt University. He won the 2015 Walkley Award for coverage of Indigenous Affairs and is the author of The Tears of Strangers (HarperCollins, 2004) and Talking to My Country (HarperCollins, 2016).

Sonya Hartnett writes for children, teenagers and adults. She lives in rural Victoria with her dog, Cole.

Melissa Howard is a freelance writer and copywriter. A PhD candidate at Deakin University, she is working on a collection of personal essays – ‘Now No-one Here Is Alone’ is the first.

Barry Humphries AO, CBE is an Australian comedian, actor, satirist, artist, and author.

Micheline Lee was born in Malaysia and migrated to Australia when she was eight. She has worked as a human rights lawyer and before taking up writing, as a painter. Her first novel, The Healing Party, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and is currently longlisted for the Voss prize.

Janine Mikosza is a Melbourne-based writer and artist. Her writing has been published in literary journals, awarded fellowships, and shortlisted for prizes, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is currently developing a non-fiction manuscript through the Hardcopy program.

Amanda C. Niehaus is a writer and scientist living in Brisbane. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, AGNI, Overland and NOON, among others. Amanda was a 2017 Varuna Fellow and winner of the 2017 Victoria University Short Story Prize and is writing a book based on her prize-winning story.

Harriet Riley is a climate specialist who has consulted to the Gates Foundation, United Nations, and EDF. She studied at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge and is currently developing a TV drama about climate change. ‘Endlings’ was awarded the 2016 Wildcare Nature Writing Prize.

Jennifer Rutherford is Director of the J.M Coetzee Centre at The University of Adelaide. She has been writing and performing experimental works integrating creative non-fiction and memoir into academic forms for many years. She is currently writing Méren, her first full-length novel.

Mandy Sayer is an award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer. Her most recent book, Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History, has just been published by New South Press.

Keane Shum leads the Mixed Movements Monitoring Unit at the UNHCR Regional Office for South-East Asia.

Robert Skinner is the editor of the short story magazine The Canary Press. He lives without a dog in Melbourne.

Sebastian Smee is the author of The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art (Penguin Random House, 2016). He has worked as an art critic for newspapers and magazines in the US, the UK and Australia. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011.

Sam Vincent’s first book, Blood and Guts: Dispatches from the Whale Wars (Black Inc., 2014) was longlisted for the 2015 Walkley Book Award and shortlisted for the 2015 Nib Award for Literature and the 2015 ACT Book of the Year Award. He is writing a book based on the essay ‘Peasant Dreaming’.

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at the New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian, in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at the New Republic from 1995 to 2007. He is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University.