November: Lily Chan, Sarah Martin, Catherine Deveny and Katia Pase

Katia Pase is the editor of Brisbane literary journal and collective, Stilts. Her own writing has been published in Voiceworks, Wet Ink, Rex, and Islet. Katia is due to complete her honours at the University of Melbourne this year.

Catherine Deveny has been a comedian, writer and professional speaker for 23 years.

She’s the author of seven books and over 1,000 columns for the Age newspaper, and is an ABC regular. She has appeared on Q&A five times — sitting next to John Elliott, Tony Abbott, Corey Bernardi, Peter Dutton and Archbishop Peter Jensen.

Deveny has performed five one-woman shows in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and has been named one of the Top 100 Most Influential Melbournians. Her charity and activist work includes public schools, public housing, feminism, atheism, asylum seekers, child abuse in the Catholic Church and homelessness.

She’s a keen commuter cycling ambassador and the co-founder of Pushy Women. She is the creator of the enormously successful Gunnas Writing Masterclasss — running 50 classes in less than 18 months. 

You’ll find her performing everywhere from debates at Melbourne Town Hall with Julian Burnside to Splendor In the Grass in Byron Bay.

She has never married and lives with her childhood sweetheart in the People's Republic Of Moreland.

Lily Chan was born in Kyoto, raised in Narrogin and now resides in Melbourne. Her novel Toyo was the recipient of the 2010 Peter Blazey Fellowship for a manuscript-in-progress.

Amanda Lohrey has said that ‘Toyo is an immensely subtle portrait of the uniqueness of the individual. It combines the readerly pleasures of the novel with those of life-writing to create a work that is vivid and surprising at every turn.’

Alice Pung has called it ‘a beautifully lyrical and compelling voice, infused with deep insight and love’.

Formerly a French, English and history teacher, Sarah Martin met and became friends with Davis McCaughey while working as development manager at Ormond College. After his death in 2005, she began researching his life, completing a PhD, with the ultimate purpose of writing a biography.

Sarah began work on Davis McCaughey’s biography in 2005. Previously she had written a novel, based on her year in France in the early 1970s.

Since beginning the biography, she has written a number of short stories. She is currently engaged on writing a series of linked stories on family life with toddlers, drawing on her own experiences with her grandchildren.