Debut Mondays

Madeleine Griffeth is an aspiring writer from Melbourne.

She has had stories published in Voiceworks magazine and was the winner of the Melbourne University Student Union’s ‘Above Water’ creative writing competition in 2009 and the John Marsden Prize for Young Australian Writers in 2011. She is also a piper for the Moorabbin City Pipe and Drum Corps (but generally chooses not to reveal this on the first date).

Lisa Jacobson’s verse novel, The Sunlit Zone, has just been released by Five Islands Press (May, 2012). The manuscript was shortlisted for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

An earlier poetry collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five Islands Press, 1995) was shortlisted for the National Book Council Awards. She has been awarded the 2011 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the HQ Short Story Prize, a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, and an Australia Council Grant to complete her next poetry collection.

Lisa’s work has been published in Australia, New York and London, and is represented in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories (UK), Peter Porter’s The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, Robert Adamson’s Best Australian Poems 2010 and Adrian Hyland’s Kinglake 350.

She shares a bush block in Melbourne with her partner and daughter.

Ruby J Murray is a writer and researcher whose work appears regularly in Australian magazines, journals and newspapers. Her first novel, Running Dogs, is out now through Scribe.

Ruby is a regular moderator and host at public events and writers festivals including the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Emerging Writers Festival, The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival and the Melbourne Free University.

Paul D. Carter is a writer and teacher from Melbourne, and winner of the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award 2012.

Paul D. Carter spent much of his youth going to Collingwood football matches with his Dad and brother, Marcus. In 2001, Paul completed a Bachelor of Arts with honours from Deakin University and in 2008 completed a PhD while writing his Vogel Award-winning first novel, Eleven Seasons, which allowed him to combine his own experience of growing up in Melbourne in the 1980s with his keen interest in modern Australian history. Paul currently teaches English and creative writing to secondary students in the western suburbs of Melbourne, as part of the Teach for Australia Programme.