Love Stories: Literature’s Great Romances

Stephen Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken won the Commonwealth Writers and Miles Franklin prizes, and his A World of Other People was named joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction in 2014.

Steven Carroll was born in Melbourne and grew up in Glenroy. He went to La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in bands in the 1970s. After leaving the music scene he began writing as a playwright and became the theatre critic for The Sunday Age. He has recently given up his lecturing post at RMIT to write full time and lives in Brunswick, Victoria.

His novels The Art of the Engine Driver and The Gift of Speed were both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2008 The Time We Have Taken won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, South-East Asia and South Pacific region as well as the 2008 Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.

Kate Holden is the author of the memoirs In My Skin: A memoir and The Romantic: Italian nights and days. She wrote a long-running column for the Age and has published features, reviews, essays and short stories in all the major Australian journals and newspapers. 

Kate is a frequent contributor to the Saturday Paper and Australian Book Review. A new book, The Winter Road, will be published in 2019 by Black Ink.

Craig Sherborne is an acclaimed memoirist, novelist, poet and playwright, best known for Hoi Polloi, Muck and The Amateur Science of Love.

Craig is the Sydney-born son of Kiwi publicans. They pursued horseracing for a lifestyle and raised him as a racecourse brat. He was transfixed by the seedy glamorousness of that milieu and people’s general avoidance of earning an honest day’s living, an attitude that, as an adult, he adapted to his own patchy career as a journalist.

He began writing in his early teens for the companionship of the page, and out of a dreamy affection for artful language, but it wasn’t until the ABC produced two of his radio plays in the early 1990s, and awarded him a drama prize, that he began to write seriously.

His poems and essays have since appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies, including Black Inc.’s Best Australian Essays and Best Australian Poems.

His memoir, Hoi Polloi, was published by Black Inc to critical acclaim in 2005. It was shortlisted for the Victorian and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards and selected for the Australia Council’s Books Alive program. Muck, the sequel to Hoi Polloi, was published in 2007 and won the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Both books were published internationally.

His novel, The Amateur Science of Love was published by Text in 2011, shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction, and won the triennial Melbourne Prize for Writing in 2012. He has a new novel coming out with Text next year.

Hannie Rayson is a playwright and screenwriter best known for Hotel Sorrento.

Hannie Rayson has established a reputation for topical, complex dramas written with wit and insight. A graduate of Melbourne University and the Victorian College of the Arts, she has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from La Trobe University.

Her plays have been extensively performed around Australia and internationally. They include Mary, Room to Move, Hotel Sorrento, Falling From Grace, Scenes from a Separation (co-written with Andrew Bovell), Competitive Tenderness, Life After George, Inheritance, Two Brothers, The Glass Soldier and The Swimming Club. She has been awarded two Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, four Helpmann Awards, two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award as well as the Age Performing Arts Award and The Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award.

For television she has written Sloth (ABC, Seven Deadly Sins) and co-written two episodes of SeaChange. A feature film of Hotel Sorrento, produced in 1995, was nominated for ten Australian Film Institute Awards. In 1999 she received the Magazine Publishers' Society of Australia’s Columnist of the Year Award for her regular contributions to HQ magazine.

Hannie made playwriting history when Life After George was the first play to be nominated for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 and 2009 she was nominated for the Melbourne Prize for Literature, a prize for a Victoria-based writer whose body of published or produced work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life.

She has recently completed a commission for the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. Her new play is called Extinction.

Lorin Clarke is a writer, director and broadcaster. She has written for stage, television, print and radio and is the television columnist for the Big Issue. Lorin co-presents the daily Stupidly Small podcast with Stew Farrell.

Her play For We Are Young And Free was nominated for the Golden Gibbo Award at the 2007 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Lorin has an arts/law degree.