September: Amy Espeseth, Courtney Collins, Amy Choi and Broede Carmody

Courtney Collins' debut novel is The Burial. Her second novel, The Walkman Mix, is a work in progress. An early draft of The Walkman Mix was shortlisted for the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Award 2011.

Both Courtney’s novels are inspired by the Australian landscape and ideas on the Australian Gothic. The Burial has been described as, ‘A dark, swooning upgrade of the Australian gothic genre'.

Courtney grew up in the Hunter Valley in NSW. She now lives happily, untidily, productively, with a bunch of artists on the Goulburn River in regional Victoria.

Courtney blogs on books and writing for ABC Arts online.

Amy Espeseth’s first novel, Sufficient Grace, was awarded the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript in 2009 and was published by Scribe in September 2012. An extract from her second novel, Trouble Telling the Weather, won the QUT Postgraduate Creative Writing Prize in 2010.

Amy was born in rural Wisconsin in 1974 and immigrated to Australia in 1998. She holds a MA in creative writing from the University of Melbourne, where she is a sessional tutor and PhD student. Her fiction has appeared in various journals, and she received the Felix Meyer Award for Literature in 2007.

Amy is the publisher at Vignette Press. Continuing Vignette’s sub-cultural journal series (including Sex Mook and Death Mook), Geek Mook was launched in late 2011. She lives in Footscray.

Amy Choi was born in Melbourne in 1975. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Quadrant, the Age and the Australian, as well as anthologies including The Oxford Book of Australian Schooldays and Growing Up Asian in Australia.

She has worked as a counter hand, in customer service, as an usher, foster carer, freelance writer and columnist. For three years she wrote a small, weekly column about op shops for the Age.

She has also written a primary school chapter book, Under the Tiles, published by Macmillan Education Australia. She lives in country Victoria with her partner and their two children.

Broede Carmody is 19 and currently studying journalism at RMIT University. He is on the Voiceworks editorial committee and has had poetry published in a variety of literary journals.

In 2010 he was one of the teen judges for the Inky Awards and this year he is a judge for the Write Across Victoria competition. He is also working on a novel.