Featured Local Writers
Helena Fox
Helena Fox is an author, poet and creative writing mentor living by the sea on Dharawal Country in Wollongong, Australia. Helena’s debut novel, HOW IT FEELS TO FLOAT, published in Australia and internationally, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Writing for Young Adults in 2020. Helena’s second novel, THE QUIET AND THE LOUD, came out in March of this year. Her poetry has been published by Red Room Poetry and in ADMISSIONS, an anthology of writing on mental health. Helena received her MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College, USA.
Ron Pretty
Ron has been writing for over forty years, and has taught writing to participants in schools, universities and community groups. Ron’s eighth and most recent book of poetry, The Left Hand Mirror, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2017. The third edition of his Creating Poetry was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2015. He published 230 books by Australian poets between 1987and 2007 as publisher for Five Islands Press. He won the NSW Premier’s Special Prize for services to literature in 2000 and received an AM for services to Australian literature in 2001.
Aunty Barbara Nicholson
Barbara is an elder of the Wadi Wadi people in the Illawarra region. She has a degree in English literature and an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Wollongong. Barbara is a poet, activist, recipient of numerous awards in Aboriginal education, published academic, lecturer and has taught coursework to inmate students at Goulburn jail and Junee Correctional Centre. She is also project leader of the Black Wallaby Writers and chief editor of Dreaming Inside: Voices from Junee Correctional Centre.
Peter Ramm
Peter is a poet and teacher. Peter has been widely published in Australian academic and literary journals and has won multiple awards for both his poetry and education writing. He was the inaugural winner of the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award and in 2022 he won the prestigious Manchester Poetry Prize. His debut poetry collection Waterlines is shortlisted for ACT Notable Book Awards.
Mark Tredinnick OAM
Mark is a celebrated Australian poet, essayist and teacher. Winner of the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011 and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2012. He is the author of thirteen books, including four volumes of poetry.
Linda Godfrey
Linda is a poet, writer, editor and former Program Manager of the Wollongong Writers Festival. She has worked as a curator of ‘Rocket Readings’ which has featured at Sydney Writers Festival, as well as a reviewer at Newtown Review of Books, and with Spineless Wonders publishing company. A passionate reader, manuscript assessor and teacher, Linda’s fiction and poetry has appeared in countless journals and anthologies. Her current ambition is to live, write and swim on the beach at Agia Triada in Crete where the Minoans built a summer palace.
Julie Keys
Julie has published short stories in numerous Australian journals and her debut novel The Artist’s Portrait was shortlisted for The Richell Prize for Emerging Writer. She was granted a residential fellowship at Varuna in 2017, has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Overland Short Story Prize, and received third place in the Boroondara Literary Awards. She has worked as a nurse and a tutor, and after escaping uninjured from a crash with a truck she resigned from her job and is now completing a PhD at the University of Wollongong and writing full-time.
Judi Morison
Judi has Gamilaroi and Celtic heritage and lives on Wadi Wadi country. A Ngana Barangarai (Black Wallaby) Indigenous Literary Project member and editorial assistant for Dreaming Inside, she writes fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has been published in a number of literary journals and she has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from UTS.
Anne-Marie Te Whiu
Anne is a Māori-Australian poet, editor, weaver, festival director and proud descendant of the Te Rarawa tribe. She studied a double major in drama and literature and won several awards for directing short plays. She has both been published in and has edited numerous anthologies, and has co-directed the QLD Poetry Festival.
Andy Muir
Award nominated screenwriter and story researcher for the hugely successful Underbelly franchise, Andy Muir has a long list of other television, film and web series on his CV. Branching out as an author, he was nominated for a Ned Kelly for his debut crime fiction novel Something for Nothing (Affirm Press, 2017). The follow up Hiding to Nothing (Affirm Press, 2019) continues the misadventures of anti-hero Lachie Munro. Involved with the BAD SYDNEY Crime Writers Festival and co-host of the BAD SYDNEY: All about Crime podcast, Andy also works as an Assistant Curator, a role that allows him to apply all of his storyteller’s curiosity to sharing Australia’s complex histories.
Mary Cunnane
Mary has spent four decades in the publishing industry in the United States and Australia. A former vice president and senior editor at W.W. Norton & Company in New York, she founded The Mary Cunnane Literary Agency in Australia in 1999 and is also a former vice-president of the Sydney PEN Centre and the Australian Literary Agents Association. Since closing her agency in 2013 Mary has been a consultant and freelance editor.
Tara June Winch
Tara hails from Wollongong, while her father is from the Wiradjuri nation of Western NSW, and both of these regions are explored in her work. She has produced three books, five anthologies, a screenplay and other essays. Tara won the 2020 Miles Franklin Award for her book The Yield as well as nine other awards and a Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative mentorship, and has been nominated or shortlisted for ten other awards.
Joshua Lobb
Joshua teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. His stories have appeared in The Bridport Prize Anthology, Best Australian Stories, Animal Studies Journal, Griffith Review, Text and Southerly. His ‘novel in stories’ about grief and climate change, The Flight of Birds was shortlisted for the 2019 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the 2020 Mascara Literary Review Avant Garde Awards for Best Fiction. He is also part of the multi-authored project, 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder.
Julie Janson
Julie is a Burruberongal woman of Darug Aboriginal nation. Her career as a playwright began when she wrote and directed plays in remote Australian Northern Territory Aboriginal communities – she has since produced ten plays, including two at Belvoir St Theatre. Now a novelist and award winning poet, Julie is a co-recipient of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal poetry prize and Judith wright poetry prize, as well as numerous fellowships.
Claire Zorn
Claire writes fiction and non-fiction that has been published in journals such as Wet Ink and the Overland Literary Journal. In 2015 and 2017 she was awarded the CBCA Children’s Book of the Year: Older Readers. Claire is a Christian and her faith influences her work: she tries to view her characters with the same compassion and judgment with which Christ views people.
Sandy Fussell
Sandy is a computer programmer passionate about using tech to encourage reading and writing in children. Her second novel Polar Boy was selected as the National Reading Day book for primary school students in 2009, and her Samurai Kids website has been archived by the National Library of Australia Pandora Project. Sandy is also children’s book reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph Funday supplement, and office manager of the SCWC!
Shady Cosgrove
Sandy is a writer and a professor of creative writing at the University of Wollongong, having published two novels and various short stories and scholarly articles. Raised in the north-western United States and moving to New York City for university, she came to Australia in 1994 and completed her PhD in Canberra. Her 2009 book She Played Elvis was shortlisted for the Australian Vogel Prize. Her forthcoming work FREEFALL explores living outside capitalism in the world of Brooklyn's dumpster-divers.
Catherine McKinnon
Catherine is a writer and a discipline leader of English and creative writing at the University of Wollongong. Her recent work – including the novel Storyland, novella Will Martin and various scholarly articles – focuses on environmental and social changes in the Illawarra since first contact, and more broadly ‘what it is to write and live in the Anthropocene.’
Pat Simmons
spent many years working in children’s services at long day care centres, museum settings and TAFE teaching, and is now a full-time writer of children’s poetry, short stories and flash fiction. She has a particular interest in connecting children with the natural world and thus often includes insects and arachnids in her work with kids – she lives with a menagerie of critters in Scarborough.
Kirli Saunders
Kirli is a proud Gunai woman, award-winning writer, artist, cultural consultant and educator. Her work includes poetry, plays and picture books, as well as developing Poetry in First Languages delivered by Red Room Poetry. Kirli has been shortlisted for the Prime Minster’s Literary Awards and ABIA 2020 Book Awards, and she was awarded the NSW Aboriginal Woman of the Year in 2020.
Caroline Baum
is a respected journalist and presenter. She has worked for the BBC, ABC, Time Life Books, Vogue magazine (UK and Australia), was the founding editor of Good Reading magazine and the Editorial Director of Booktopia. She has been a judge of the Stella Prize, the Ned Kelly and Kibble Awards. She is in demand as a presenter at Writers Festivals across Australia and has interviewed many of the world's top international authors. Her writing has been published in major national publications and online media. She is currently researching a biography for a DCA in Creative Writing at University of Wollongong and is the recipient of the Hazel Rowley Fellowship 2015. She is married to screenwriter David Roach.
Kate Holden
Kate is the author of In My Skin: A memoir and The Romantic: Italian nights and days, both best-selling non-fiction memoirs published by Text. Kate teaches writing and writes a longstanding column for the Age. Her forthcoming book, The Winter Road, will be released in 2020 by Black Inc.
Alan Baxter
Alan writes horror, supernatural thrillers and dark fantasy, mixed with crime, mystery and noir. He is also a martial arts expert. Alan runs workshops on various facets of writing at schools, libraries and other venues, and has been shortlisted many times for the Aurealis, Australian Shadows and Ditmar Awards, including four wins of the Australian Shadows Award.
Dianne Bates
Dianne has published over 120 books, mostly for young readers. Her works have been translated into French, Danish and German and have won state and national awards. Dianne has received grants and fellowships from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts and toured for the National Book Council. In 2008 she received The Lady Cutler Prize for distinguished services to children’s lit.
Alyssa Montgomery
Alyssa studied speech pathology in Queensland and met her (pilot) soulmate working as a flight attendant. They now have three children and Alyssa still works in speech pathology: she started writing romances while at home after the birth of her twins. Alyssa is a two-time finalist in the Australian Romance Readers Awards and is an Amazon bestseller for four books, and winner of numerous Romance Writers Australia awards.
Christine Howe
Christine grew up on the far South Coast of NSW and currently lives in Wollongong. She earned a PhD in Creative Writing in 2009 and has been teaching at the University of Wollongong since 2005. Her first novel, Song in the Dark, is a story of love, betrayal, addiction and hope.
Kate Liston-Mills
Kate is an Australian author, tutor and mother. Both her creative works and journalism have been published in various anthologies, journals and newspapers. She has a Bachelor of Primary Education and a Bachelor of Creative Writing, as well as Master of Education and a Freelance Journalism Certificate. Inspired by her hometown of Pambula on Yuin land, the people living there and their experiences of tragedy and triumph in everyday life, Kate is a passionate social justice advocate. She has authored two collections of illustrated short stories: The Waterfowl Are Drunk! (2015) and Dear Ibis (2021).
Luke Johnson
Luke is a professor of creative writing and literary theory at the University of Wollongong and the University of Technology Sydney. He has been published in The Age, The Drum and New Matilda, and has had peer-reviewed research published nationally and internationally. His fiction has been published in numerous journals and he was shortlisted in 2014 for the Josephine Ulrick Prize in Literature.
Jack Oats
Jack has been a teacher, ornithologist, conservation biologist, bureaucrat, father, grandfather and husband. He is now a writer of short fiction and creative nonfiction. His first published collection of poetry – Soaring – casts doubts, celebrates Australia’s natural heritage, shares hope and gives love.
Hayley Scrivenor
Hayley Scrivenor’s internationally published debut novel, DIRT TOWN (titled DIRT CREEK in North America), became an instant #1 Australian bestseller in 2022. It has been translated into multiple languages and shortlisted for a number of awards, including the Penguin Literary Prize, a 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Mystery, Best First Novel in the 2023 International Thriller Writers Awards, two ABIAs, an Australian Indie Book Award, and the CWA New Blood Dagger. Hayley holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wollongong and is a former Director of the Wollongong Writers Festival.
Tim Flannery
Tim Flannery is a scientist, an explorer, a conservationist and a leading writer on climate change. He has held various academic positions including visiting Professor in Evolutionary and Organismic Biology at Harvard University, Director of the South Australian Museum, Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum, Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne, and Panasonic Professor of Environmental Sustainability, Macquarie University. His books include the award-winning international bestseller The Weather Makers, Here on Earth and Atmosphere of Hope. Flannery was the 2007 Australian of the Year. He is currently chief councillor of the Climate Council.
David Stavanger
David Stavanger is poet, performer, producer, editor and lapsed psychologist living on unceded Dharawal land. His first collection The Special won the Thomas Shapcott and Wesley Michel Wright prizes and his latest collection, Case Notes, won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. David is the co-editor of Solid Air: Collected Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word and recently Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health (Upswell, 2022.) He currently works for Red Room Poetry producing Poetry Month and MAD Poetry.
Christine Sykes
Christine was a volunteer at Dress for Success Sydney for over four years. She served as a Senior Public Servant for 30 years. She is the author of award winning novel The Changing Room, and Gough And Me.
Ali Jane Smith
Ali is a Wollongong-based poet and essayist. She has published a chapbook - Gala - through Five Islands Press in 2006, and her poem ‘Another Literary Life’ was selected as Australian Poetry Journal’s Poem of the Year in 2015. Many of her essays and reviews can be found in the Sydney Review of Books, Weekend Australian and numerous others through her website.
Inga Simpson
Igna is an Australian novelist whose work centres largely on trees and nature, with doctoral education in creative writing and English literature. She has published four novels and an illustrated children’s book, has been shortlisted four times and has won the Eric Rolls Nature Essay Prize. Her work has been published in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Review of Australian Fiction, Griffith Review, Clues, Writing Queensland and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Her next novel is set to be released in November 2021 and she is currently working on another.
Meredith Jaffe
Meredith is the author of three novels, as well as the first in a series for children. She is the co-founder and director of the South Coast festival StoryFest, previously wrote a weekly column for The Hoopla and has been published in The Guardian, The Huffington Post and Mamamia. She is currently available for facilitating literary events, giving talks and attending book clubs.
Jonica Newby
Jonica is an author, science reporter, presenter, speaker and director. She is a founding member of the science show Catalyst in 2000, is a recipient of the World TV Award and a two-time winner of Australia’s most prestigious science journalism award the Eureka Prize. Her latest book Beyond Climate Grief explores the emotional turmoil of climate change.
Isabella Luna
Isabella is a queer writer and performing artist living on Dharawal land. They have won the Heroines Festival Poetry Award and were the coordinator and MC of the Enough Said Poetry Slam for five years. They’re work has been featured in various publications and festivals including the Cordite Poetry Review, Baby Teeth Journal, the Heroines Festival, Wollongong Writer’s Festival, Sydney’s StoryFest and once in Texas via Skype.
Catherine Rey
Catherine is a French-Australian writer. She was born in France and has lived there and in Australia at various points in her life, now residing in NSW. She has published eight novels in French, two of which have been translated into English, and has been shortlisted for the Prix Femina and Prix Renaudot.
Mark McKenna
Mark is a history writer and professor at the University of Sydney. Much of his work is centred around Aboriginal history and political issues such as republicanism in Australia. His novel about Manning Clark won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction as well as the premier’s award in four states.
Scott Ludlam
Scott is an activist, former Greens senator and writer. He has written for Meanjin, The Monthly, Junkee and The Guardian. His book on ecology, technology, and politics – Full Circle – was published in 2021.
Meaghan Holt
Meaghan or Sassi Nooyoom Is an indigenous writer and performance poet. In 2019 she was granted mentorship under Ali Cobby Eckermann – a mentorship awarded to a poet with ‘the capacity to heal.’ Her writing is guided by her mother’s spirit and the bloodline of her ancestors. She has performed at the Giiyong Writer’s Festival and was published in the Australian Short Stories Edition 66.
John Blay
John is a writer and naturalist whose many works of prose, drama and poetry centres on the bush and is people. He has served as a national Arts and Reviews Editor, and in 1982 had a newly-discovered species of wattle named in his honour. His artistry has also extended into photography and sculpture.
Gabbie Stroud
Gabbie is a freelance writer, novelist and ex-primary school teacher with a Masters degree specializing in how kids learn to read and write. Since 2009 she has published a young-adult novel, a memoir and a nonfiction work about teaching called Dear Parents.
Gary Lonesborough
Gary is a Yuin writer. Having been a writer since childhood, he went on to study at film school, worked on the film adaptation of Jasper Jones and recently published his debut young-adult novel, The Boy from the Mish. He is also a recipient of the Copyright Agency First Nations Fellowship.
Suzanne Burdon
Suzanne is the author of an award-winning novel, Almost Invincible: A Biographical Novel of Mary Shelley, Author of Frankenstein, and a collection of poetry, Socio-Illogical. Suzanne is a sociologist, research consultant and communication specialist living in Gerroa. She has also worked in advertising, marketing and education. She served on the Board of The Australian Society of Authors for four years and on the Committee of the Research Society of NSW for three years. She has been the founder and president of the inaugural Berry Writers Festival.
Tamryn Bennett
Tamryn Bennett is a poet and Artistic Director of Red Room Poetry living on Dharawal land. She has founded a number of poetic projects including Poetry Month and Poem Forest. Her two poetry collections are Icaros (Vagabond Press) and phosphene (Rabbit Poetry). She is also editor of Líneas en tierra / Lines in land— a bilingual collection of Mexican poetry. Tamryn's poetic projects have been exhibited and published widely in Australia and internationally including the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Tamryn has a PhD in 'comics poetry' from the University of New South Wales where she also taught Creative Writing.
Pamela Cook
Pamela Cook is an author, podcaster and teacher who writes page-turning contemporary women’s fiction, delving deep into the psychology of her characters and the complexity of relationships in all their forms. She has had four novels published traditionally and two independent titles. Pamela is the host of the Writes4Women podcast and teaches writing workshops through her business, Wildwords, and at various writers’ centres. Her latest release is All We Dream.
Joseph Davis
Dr Joseph Davis is the author of D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul (HarperCollins, 1989), The Illawarra Society of Artists (2001) and Lake Illawarra: an ongoing history (2005) along with hundreds of articles on art, literature, history and the environment.
Anne Howell
Anne Howell published her memoir, All That I Forgot, with Bad Apple Press in 2022. She is now writing a novel, and also freelances as a writer for the arts, education and refugee support. Anne completed a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wollongong in 2013. After recovering from retrograde amnesia in Sydney, and making a sea change south, she worked as a journalist for local newspapers and edited a youth and arts magazine. She was a staff journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald for six years, including a stint on police rounds and as arts editor for the Eastern Herald.
Kylie Needham
Kylie Needham is an award-winning screenwriter. She holds a Bachelor of Arts/Communication (Theatre/Media) and both a Master of Arts (English Literature) and a Master of Creative Writing. Kylie has won two AWGIE (Australian Writers’ Guild) Awards for television scriptwriting. Her credits include Fighting Season, Crownies and Offspring. Kylie’s work has been published in Meanjin, Better Read Than Dead Writing Anthology 2019 and 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart. She lives in Robertson in the Southern Highlands of NSW. Girl in a Pink Dress is her first novel.
Susan McCreery
Susan McCreery lives in Thirroul. Her short stories, microfiction and poetry have been published widely and recognised for many awards. Her latest book, All the Unloved – a novella set in an apartment block in ’90s Bondi –was Fiction Pick of the Week in The Sydney Morning Herald, where its prose was described as ‘terrifically compressed, with diamond-like sentences and snippets the reader will pore over at least twice’. For the past 25 years, Susan has worked as a proofreader/copy editor for trade publishers and for Australian Geographic. Susan’s previous books are This Person Is Not That Person, Loopholes and Waiting for the Southerly. She has also completed a novel.
Siobhán McHugh
Siobhán McHugh is a narrative podcast producer, consultant, critic, author and academic, who has won seven gold podcast awards at New York Festivals. Siobhán’s collaborations include Walkley-award-winning The Greatest Menace, about a ‘gay prison’ experiment, described as ‘Australia’s S-Town’. She partnered with The Age on hit podcasts Phoebe’s Fall, Wrong Skin, and The Last Voyage of The Pong Su and co-hosts Heart of Artness, about crosscultural aspects of Aboriginal art production. Siobhán’s book, The Power of Podcasting: telling stories through sound (2022), is ‘packed with useful insights and ideas: the most in-depth guide to the best audio storytelling around the world’ - Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole). She spoke alongside Dana Chivvis, producer of Serial, at one podcast summit.
Rachael Mogan McIntosh
Rachael Mogan McIntosh is a mum of three, crisis counsellor and community trainer from the south coast of NSW. Her writing has appeared in publications across Australia, France and the USA. Pardon My French is her first book and her second book, Mothering Heights, will be published with Affirm Press in 2024.
Kate Scott
Kate Scott is the author of ‘Compulsion’, a novel animated by her early career as a music journalist and editor. She spent ten years with The Australian Ballet as their in-house writer and head of marketing, where she edited the award-winning photography book ‘Luminous’. Kate now lives in Thirroul on New South Wales’s south coast and works as a freelance arts strategist. ‘Compulsion’ is her debut novel. katescott.au
David Stavanger
David Stavanger is poet, performer, producer, editor and lapsed psychologist living on unceded Dharawal land. His first collection The Special won the Thomas Shapcott and Wesley Michel Wright prizes and his latest collection, Case Notes, won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. David is the co-editor of Solid Air: Collected Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word and recently Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health (Upswell, 2022.) He currently works for Red Room Poetry producing Poetry Month and MAD Poetry.
Graham Thorbum
After beginning his working life as an electronic engineer, Graham changed career paths towards theatre and television, where he had a long and successful career as an actor, director, producer, writer, teacher and academic. He has directed over 70 hours of prime-time TV, occasionally writing and producing as well. He was the third President of ASDA (now the Australian Directors Guild) and has held many other positions on various film and TV industry organisations. These days he works as story consultant for screenplays, novels and memoirs, principally in the USA and UK.
Holly Trenaman
Holly Trenaman (she/her) is a writer and filmmaker based on Dharawal land, working on comedic adult fiction and children’s picture books, while freelancing and working at Screen Illawarra. Having graduated from a Bachelor of Screen Production at AFTRS, she now studies a Masters of Creative Writing at UTS. She’s the writer and director of award-winning short film 'Dating Violet' and has had short stories published in Global Hobo, Uni Junkee, the Young Writers Collective Anthology and UTS Anthology 2022.
Jo Oliver
Jo Oliver is a writer and printmaker. She is the author of two biographies of Australian women artists, Adelaide Perry: writer and teacher, 2022 and Jessie Traill: a biography, 2020, both published by Australian Scholarly Publishing. Jo was previously author and illustrator of four published children’s picture books using printmaking techniques. Jo received a Creative Fellowship from the State Library of Victoria and was shortlisted for the Hazel Rowley Fellowship in 2021 and 2022. She was invited to contribute to the National Gallery of Australia’s 2021 book, Know My Name: 150 Australia Women Artists 1900 to Now, 2021.
Claire O’Rouke
Claire O'Rourke is a campaigner, communicator, behaviour change expert, partner and parent. Claire helps people and organisations take action on climate change, currently as Energy Transformation Program Co-Director at The Sunrise Project. Previously Claire was National Director of Solar Citizens, a community-led renewable energy advocacy organisation. A former journalist, Claire has extensive experience campaigning for social impact, including driving communications for the Every Australian Counts campaign for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and as a senior leader at Amnesty International Australia.
Sue Turnbull
Sue Turnbull is Senior Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong. Her academic publications include Media Audiences (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and The TV Crime Drama (Edinburgh University Press 2014). Her most recent book Transnational TV Crime: From the Nordic to the Outback, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 202. Sue reviews crime fiction for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, is an Ambassador for Sisters in Crime Australia and Chair of the BAD Sydney Crime Festival.