What the Hell? The Handmaid's Tale in 2017

Deborah Frances-White is a stand up comedian, writer, speaker and podcaster. She is best known as the creator and host of The Guilty Feminist Podcast – which has had 20 million downloads in its first 18 months. It has just been nominated for a 2017 Aria Award for Best Podcast. She is currently writing a Guilty Feminist book for Virago at Little, Brown.

Her BBC Radio 4 show Deborah Frances-White Rolls the Dice is an anthology of stand-up comedy and dramatised stories about her real life experiences, including finding her biological mother and leaving a cult. The first series won The Writers’ Guild Award for Best Radio Comedy in the UK, and the second series has just aired.

Deborah is a screenwriter whose first feature film Say My Name is currently in post-production with Electric Entertainment.

She regularly speaks about diversity and inclusion in the business world, and her clients include Facebook, LinkedIn, EY and Microsoft. She was nominated for a First Woman Award for her work in diversity in 2016. Deborah is also the host and creator of Global Pillage, a diversity-based comedy panel show podcast. She is currently curating a podcast season in association with Time Peace, a British app which connects local people with refugees to build community and share skills.

Lauren Duca is an award-winning and -losing freelance journalist best known for her viral piece 'Donald Trump is Gaslighting America', and calling Tucker Carlson a 'partisan hack' on national television. In addition to working on her Thigh-High Politics column for Teen Vogue, Lauren's work can be found in/on New York magazine, the New Yorker, the New Inquiry, the Nation, Pacific Standard, Cosmopolitan and Complex, among other publications.

Krissy Kneen is the award-winning author of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, including An Uncertain Grace, which was shortlisted for the Stella Prize.

She has written and directed broadcast television documentaries and is the current Copyright Agency Ltd Non-fiction Fellow. The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen is her latest book. 

Celeste Liddle is an Arrernte woman (traditional owner in Central Australia) who was born in Canberra and has been living in Melbourne since she was a teenager. She is a trade unionist, an activist, a feminist, a social commentator and an opinion writer. In May 2021, she was announced as the preselected Greens candidate for the seat of Cooper in the upcoming Federal Election.

Celeste currently has a column with Eureka Street but has additionally been published by Fairfax, Newscorp, ABC, SBS, and many independent publications. In addition to this, Celeste has contributed to a number of anthologies of note including Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia and Mothers and Others.

She completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University in 2002, a Graduate Diploma in Arts (primarily Political Sciences) at the University of Melbourne in 2012 and a Masters of Communications and Media Studies at Monash in 2020.​

Quinn Eades is a researcher, writer, and poet whose work lies at the nexus of feminist and queer theories of the body, autobiography, and philosophy. Eades is published nationally and internationally, and is the author of all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, and Rallying.

Eades is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies at La Trobe University, as well as the founding editor of Australia's only interdisciplinary, peer reviewed, gender, sexuality and diversity studies journal, Writing from Below. He is currently working on a collection of fragments written from the transitioning body, titled Transpositions.

In 2015 Quinn Eades changed his name and gender. Prior to 2015, he was writing and speaking as Karina Quinn.

Author photograph by Jamie James.

Jamila Rizvi is a diversity, equity and inclusion expert, best-selling author, and sought-after public speaker. She is Deputy Managing Director of Future Women, an organisation that helps women who face barriers to employment ...