Debut Mondays: Gretchen Shirm, Lisa Reece-Lane, Kristel Thornell and Ingrid Laguna

Gretchen Shirm is a Sydney lawyer and writer. Her collection of interwoven short stories Having Cried Wolf received the 2009 DJ O'Hearn Memorial Fellowship for Emergent Writers.

Gretchen Shirm was born in Kiama in 1979 and moved to the north coast of NSW as a teenager. She has also lived in Holland and Ireland and currently lives in Sydney where she works as a lawyer. Gretchen received the 2009 DJ O'Hearn Fellowship for Emergent Writers for Having Cried Wolf, which will be published in September 2010 by Affirm Press. She holds a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Her fiction has been published in various journals.

Lisa Reece-Lane studied music at the Victorian College of the Arts and Milk Fever is her first novel.

Born in London, Lisa Reece-Lane moved to Australia with her family and studied music at Victorian College of the Arts and later, Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam. She played with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and other orchestras here and overseas.

Lisa began writing after the birth of her son. She wrote two adult fiction manuscripts and several short stories. She entered the first draft of Milk Fever into the Victorian Writers Centre mentorship program and was lucky enough to secure a mentorship with Clare Forster (formerly Penguin). Following in the footsteps of her yoga teacher mother, Lisa studied yoga and also pilates, which she currently teaches.

The author made a tree change five years ago from inner city Melbourne to the Yarra Valley where she now lives with her son, a foxhound and way too many possums.

Kristel Thornell won the 2009 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her first novel, Night Street.

Born in 1975, Kristel Thornell grew up in Sydney and the Blue Mountains. She studied French and Italian at the University of Sydney and spent a year in Italy, researching the author Giorgio Bassani and then teaching English as a foreign language. She has lived in North America for much of the last ten years, in Mexico, the United States and Canada, where she completed an MA in English at the University of New Brunswick.

She has also taught Italian language and literature, French and Spanish, and has published reviews, poetry and fiction in a range of journals, including Meanjin, Overland, Southerly and Island. For the last two and half years, she has been working on a PhD in Creative Writing, supervised by Nicholas Jose, first through the University of Adelaide and now with the University of Western Sydney. Kristel is currently living in Helsinki, Finland and the USA. Her first novel, Night Street, was the co-winner of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2009.