Cate Kennedy is the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection Dark Roots and the novel The World Beneath, both published by Scribe, as well as poetry collections and a travel memoir. Her work has appeared in many publications and anthologies, including The Best Australian Stories, Harvard Review and the New Yorker. She works as a mentor, editor and judge when not at work on her own writing. She lives in northeast Victoria.
Debra Adelaide has published over ten books, including three novels: The Hotel Albatross, Serpent Dust and, most recently, The Household Guide to Dying, which has been published in a dozen countries. She has also been a freelance researcher, editor and book reviewer and is now a senior lecturer in creative practices at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Stephanie Buckle lived in the UK and New Zealand before settling in Canberra. She has been a teacher and a counsellor and began writing in 2003 after the Canberra bushfires. Her writing has won numerous awards and several of her stories have appeared in Island. She is currently working on her third novel, as well as continuing to write short fiction.
Julie Chevalier lives in Sydney. Permission to Lie, a collection of her short stories, was published by Spineless Wonders in 2011. Her poetry collection linen tough as history is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann and Darger: His Girls, a poetry sequence about the life of the reclusive artist Henry Darger, will be available in 2012.
Catherine Cole has published three novels (Dry Dock, Skin Deep and The Grave at Thu Le) and two non-fiction books (Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction and The Poet Who Forgot). She edited The Perfume River: Writing from Vietnam and co-edited Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television. She has also published poetry, short stories, essays and reviews and is professor of creative writing and deputy dean of creative arts at the University of Wollongong.
Mark Dapin is the author of the bestselling Australian travel memoir Strange Country and the Ned Kelly Award-winning novel King of the Cross. His second novel, Spirit House, was released in September 2011. He is a features writer and columnist for Good Weekend.
Liam Davison has published four novels and two collections of short fiction. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Book Council Award for Fiction for his novel Soundings. He writes for the books pages of the Australian and lives in Melbourne.
Marele Day is the author of seven novels, including the internationally acclaimed Lambs of God and, most recently, The Sea Bed. She lives and works on the far north coast of New South Wales.
Deborah FitzGerald is a journalist who lives and works in Sydney’s inner west. She is married to a remarkable man, Mark Waugh, and mother to two beautiful sons, Mac and Finn. In 2006 she won a Harper Collins/Varuna Development Award for her first manuscript, Tower Hill, which is as yet unpublished. She has a Master of Arts in creative writing from the University of Technology, Sydney, and is currently working on a second novel.
Rebecca Giggs is a writer of essays, fiction and poetry. She grew up in Western Australia, in what geologists refer to as the passive margin that runs between the Yilgarn Craton and the sea. Her work can be read in literary journals, in books and online.
Rodney Hall’s books have been published in the USA, UK, Australia and Canada and in translation into German, French, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean. His radio and TV scripts have been broadcast by the ABC and the BBC. He has twice won the Miles Franklin Award (for Just Relations in 1982 and The Grisly Wife in 1994) and was presented with the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society in 1992 and in 2001. His new collection of short fiction, Silence, will be published in November 2011.
Marion Halligan’s books include Spider Cup, Lovers’ Knots, Wishbone, The Golden Dress, The Fog Garden, The Point, The Apricot Colonel, Valley of Grace, Shooting the Fox, a children’s book and books of autobiography, travel and food, including The Taste of Memory. In 2006 she was awarded an AM.
Karen Hitchcock is a writer and doctor. Her collection of short stories, Little White Slips, won the 2010 Queensland Premier’s Steele-Rudd Award and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the Dobbie Award. Her first novel, Read My Lips, will be published by Picador in 2012.
Sarah Holland-Batt was born in Queensland in 1982. Her first book, Aria, won the Arts ACT Judith Wright Poetry Prize, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the FAW Anne Elder Award. She is also the recipient of the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, an Australia Council Literature Residency in Rome and the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. She lives in New York.
Nicholas Jose has published seven novels, two collections of short stories, a book of essays and a memoir. He has a chair in writing with the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.
Sharon Kent has recently completed her second postgraduate writing degree at UTS, a Master of Arts in writing by research. Her stories have been published in several UTS writers’ anthologies, in Southerly and in national magazines including HQ. She is working on her first novel, which has attracted three Varuna fellowships and a reading at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. She lives with her five-year-old son and is currently travelling the outback in an old bus.
Russell King was born in England and emigrated to Australia twenty years ago. He has lived in Sydney, Brisbane and the Northern Territory. He currently works as a general practitioner and lecturer at the School of Rural Medicine, University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales. This is his first published story.
Karen Manton lives in Batchelor, one hundred kilometres south of Darwin. She won the Arafura Short-story Award in 2003, 2009 and 2010. Her work has been published in The Best Australian Stories 2005, True North and Bruno’s Song and Other Stories from the Northern Territory.
Jennifer Mills is the author of two novels, The Diamond Anchor and Gone. Her work has been widely published, broadcast and performed and has received numerous awards. A collection of her short fiction will be published by UQP in 2012. She lives in South Australia.
Louis Nowra is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter and essayist. He lives in Sydney.
Mark O’Flynn’s stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines. He has published three collections of poetry as well as two novels, most recently Grassdogs in 2006. A third novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins.
Penny O’Hara is a Canberra-based poet and short-story writer. Her work has appeared in the online journal Islet and in the anthologies FIRST 2009: Undertow, FIRST 2010: Shattered and Block. She was highly commended in the 2010 Michael Thwaites Poetry Award.
Favel Parrett’s debut novel, Past the Shallows, was published in 2011 by Hachette Australia. She is currently working on her second.
Joanne Riccioni’s stories have been published in the Age, The Best Australian Stories 2010, Westerly, Stylus and Taralla, and have been read on the BBC and anthologised in the USA. She is currently working on her first novel, which will be published by Scribe.
Tim Richards is a Melbourne-based writer. The most recent of his three books is Thought Crimes, a collection of short stories. He works as a script assessor for Screen Australia and teaches screenwriting at Box Hill TAFE and RMIT.
Kate Rotherham lives in northeastern Victoria. Her stories have won national awards and appeared in anthologies, journals and magazines including Award Winning Australian Writing 2011 and 2010, Island and page seventeen. She is working on a collection of short stories, often finding inspiration in the wide-eyed wonder and fantastic energy of her four young children.
Michael Sala spent his childhood moving between Holland and Australia. He was shortlisted for the Vogel/Australian Literary Award in 2007 and his work has appeared in publications including HEAT, Brothers and Sisters, Kill Your Darlings, Harvest, Etchings and The Best Australian Stories 2009 and 2010. He lives and teaches in Newcastle. His memoir will be published by Affirm Press early in 2012.
Gretchen Shirm was born in 1979, grew up in Kiama and moved to Ballina as a teenager. Her first book of interwoven short stories, Having Cried Wolf, was published in 2010. She was named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists in 2011.
Nick Smith is working on a comic novel as part of a PhD in creative writing at the Australian National University. He has previously been published in Westerly, Kill Your Darlings, McSweeneys, Australian Short Stories, Harvest, Block, fourW, Redoubt and Perilous Adventures.
Miriam Sved’s fiction has appeared in journals including Meanjin, Overland and Strange. With the help of an Arts Victoria development grant she is currently completing a series of short stories set in and around an AFL football club. Her novel, After the Game, was commended in the IP Picks Awards. She has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, where she teaches creative writing.
Leah Swann lives in Melbourne with her husband and two children. She is a freelance writer and former public-relations manager. Her first book, Bearings, a collection of short stories and a novella, was published this year by Affirm Press.
Chris Womersley is a Melbourne-based writer of fiction, reviews and essays. His work has appeared in Granta, The Best Australian Stories 2006 and 2010, the Griffith Review and the Age. In 2007 one of his stories won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature. He won the 2008 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction for his novel The Low Road. His second novel, Bereft, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Australian Society of Literature Gold Medal and won the Indie Award for Best Fiction.