The Sentimental Bloke

Craig Reucassel was a founding editor of The Chaser newspaper. With the Chaser he has gone on to do shows on the ABC such as The Election Chaser, CNNNN and The Chaser’s War on Everything.

Craig also hosted the drive shift Today Today on Triple J for two years. Craig is married, has three children and plans to sleep in 2020.

Michael Cathcart presents the radio show, Books and Arts Daily for Radio National.

He has a background in Australian history and culture, both in writing and teaching. Michael is passionate about the arts and has worked as a theatre director, dramaturge and script editor. He is a regular participant in writers’ festivals.

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.

Dr Anne Summers AO is a journalist, researcher, commentator and best-selling author of nine books, including the classic Damned Whores and God’s Police, first published in 1975, and still in print. Her most recent book Unfettered and Alive, a memoir, was published in 2018. In 2021 Anne was appointed a Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellow, located at UTS, and commissioned to undertake original data-based research that will throw new shocking light on the incidence and nature of domestic violence in Australia. The result of that research is the report, The Choice: violence or poverty was published on 7 July 2022 Previously Anne has advised Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, on women’s issues, run the Office of the Status of Women, been editor-in-chief of America’s leading feminist magazine Ms., editor of Good Weekend, chair of the Board of Greenpeace International and a Trustee of the Powerhouse Museum. She has been an activist in the women’s movement since its inception and in 1974 was involved in establishing Elsie Women’s Refuge the first modern shelter for women and children escaping domestic violence. She was appointed an officer of the Order of Australia for her services to journalism and to women in 1989; had her image on a postage stamp as an Australian Legend in 2011 and in 2017 was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame