Featured

Helena Fox

Helena Fox is the founder of SCWC’s Young Writers Program and the mentor of the Young Writers Collective. Her debut novel, How It Feels To Float, won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Award. Her second novel, The Quiet and The Loud, was shortlisted for the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award for Older Readers and the ABIA Book of the Year Award for Older Children.

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.

Judi Morison

Judi Morison is a writer of Gamilaroi and Celtic descent. Her fiction and poetry have been published in anthologies and journals including UTS Writers’ Anthology (2019, 2020, 2021), Ace II (2020), 40: Forty Years of the UTS Writers’ Anthology (2022), Red Room Poetry and The Saltbush Review. She is the recipient of the 2022 Boundless Emerging Writers Mentorship.

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.

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.

Catherine McKinnon

Catherine McKinnon’s new novel, To Sing of War (2024), is published by Fourth Estate, Harper Collins. Her novel Storyland (Fourth Estate, Harper Collins, 2017) was shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the 2018 Barbara Jefferis Award, the 2018 Voss Literary Prize and was named one of ABC TV’s The Book Club’s Five of the Best in 2017. Storyland is being adapted into a play for Merrigong Theatre.

Caroline Baum

Caroline Baum is an author, journalist and presenter of the Life Sentences podcast. Caroline was the founding editor of Good Reading magazine, the long-term presenter of ABC TV book program Between the Lines and worked as an executive producer with ABC Radio National. Her first book, Only: A Singular Memoir, was published in 2017.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Jeff Apter

Jeff Apter is the author of more than 30 books dealing with the world of music and musicians. His subjects include AC/DC’s Angus and Malcolm Young, Keith Urban, the Bee Gees, Jon English and Neil Finn. He spent five years on staff at Australian Rolling Stone and wrote for the magazine for 25 years.

Mitch Jennings

Mitch Jennings is a writer, journalist and comedian. His debut novel A Town Called Treachery was shortlisted for the 2022 HarperCollins Banjo Prize. He has multiple fiction and non-fiction works in progress, including his second novel set in Wollongong. He has worked as a journalist at the Illawarra Mercury for the last 10 years.

Dinuka McKenzie

Dinuka McKenzie is an Australian writer and the author of the Detective Kate Miles crime series, The Torrent, Taken and Tipping Point. She is the winner of the 2020 HarperCollins Australia Banjo Prize. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards, the Bad Sydney Crime Danger Awards, and longlisted for the Richell Prize.

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.

Local

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.

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.

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.

Joshua Lobb

Joshua Lobb is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. His ‘novel in stories’, 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.

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!

Pat Simmons

Pat has 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sarah Clutton

Sarah Clutton is a former lawyer, freelance writer and author. Her first novels were domestic suspense, published by Bookouture, Hachette UK. Sarah holds a Graduate Diploma in Arts (Writing) and was national recipient of the 2018 Dymocks McIntosh Commercial Fiction Scholarship.

Malcom Knox

Malcolm Knox has won three Walkley Awards and a Human Rights Award. His novels include Summerland; A Private Man, winner of the Ned Kelly Award; Jamaica, which won the Colin Roderick Award and was shortlisted in the 2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards; The Life; The Wonder Lover; and Bluebird. His upcoming novel, The First Friend, will be published in September 2024.

Alana Valentine

Alana Valentine is one of Australia's most acclaimed playwrights. She is the author of more than 20 published works, including two books of non-fiction. Alana's plays include Wayside Bride (Belvoir), Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan (co-written with Christos Tsiolkas), Wudjang: Not the Past (Bangarra, co-written with Stephen Page) and Barbara and the Camp Dogs (Belvoir, cowritten with Ursula Yovich).

In memorial

Jack Oats

Jack has been a teacher, anthologist, 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.

Writers

Aunty Barbara Nicholson

Aunty Barb Nicholson is a Wadi Wadi Elder and Life Member of the SCWC. She directs the Ngana Barangarai (Black Wallaby) project which has collected and published writing from First Australian inmates in Junee Correctional Centre for the last twelve years, and recently oversaw the program’s introduction into Dillwynia Women’s Correctional Centre.

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.

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.

Julie Janson

Julie Janson is a Burruberongal woman of Darug nation. Her novels include Compassion (2024), Madukka the River Serpent (2022), longlisted for the Miles Franklin and Davitt Awards, and Benevolence (2020), shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis, NIB and Voss Awards. Winner of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize 2016 and the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2019.

Shady Cosgrove

Associate Professor Shady Cosgrove teaches creative writing at the University of Wollongong. Her books include Flight (Life Before Man), What the Ground Can't Hold (Picador) and She Played Elvis (Allen and Unwin). Her writing has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Dreaming Awake, The Writing Mind, Cordite, Overland, Antipodes, Southerly, Island, takahe, Eunoia Review and Spineless Wonders.

Kirli Saunders

Kirli Saunders (OAM) is a proud Gunai Woman, award-winning author, multidisciplinary artist and consultant who creates to connect to make change. Kirli has partnered with global organisations including Google, Fender, Sydney Opera House, Qantas and Spotify, Mecca and Aesop to celebrate stories and cultivate change. Her books among others include Bindi, Kindred and Returning (Magabala).

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.

Dr Christine Howe

Dr Christine Howe is a writer and academic in Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. Her first novel, Song in the Dark, was published by Penguin, and her short works have appeared in the Griffith Review, Island, Cordite, TEXT, and Law, Text, Culture, as well as anthologies published by Spineless Wonders Press and Recent Work Press.

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. 

Christine Skyes

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.

Meredith Jaffe

Meredith Jaffé is the author of four novels for adults. Her bestselling novel, The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison, was voted in the 2023 and the 2022 Better Reading Top 100 and the 2021 Booktopia Favourite Australian Book Award Top 50. Previously, she wrote the weekly literary column for the online women’s magazine The Hoopla.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Emma Darragh

Emma Darragh holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wollongong. Her writing has appeared in numerous Australian publications, including Cordite, Westerly, Meniscus, TEXT, and The Big Issue. Emma’s debut novel-in-stories, Thanks for Having Me, is published by JOAN.

Liv Lorkin

Liv Lorkin is a heart-led creative, children's book author, and illustrator. She self-published her first picture book in 2021, Winter in Ballarat. Since then, she has authored five and illustrated six more books, culminating in her latest release, Sage and the Journey of Grief. Drawing from her childhood experience of losing her mum, Liv infuses her middle-grade work with authenticity and empathy.

Kell Woods

Kell Woods is an Australian historical fantasy author. Her debut novel After the Forest was published simultaneously by Tor (US), Titan Books (UK) and Harper Voyager (AU & NZ) in October 2023. Kell studied English literature, creative writing and librarianship, and has worked in libraries and museums for the past thirteen years.