Parliament: Melbourne, 2008

Alison Croggon is an award-winning novelist, poet, theatre writer, critic and editor who lives in Melbourne, Australia. She works in many genres and her books and poems have been published to acclaim nationally and internationally.

She is arts editor for The Saturday Paper and co-founder of the performance criticism website Witness. Her most recent book is the creative non-fiction Monsters, out in March 2021, from Scribe Publications.

Beth Driscoll is a Lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, and is part of a team that recently received a Romance Writers of America academic grant to study the genre world of romance in twenty-first century Australia. 

Beth has written about her experience teaching a Nora Roberts' novella to university students for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, and is the author of The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Lili Wilkinson is the award-winning author of eighteen books for young people, including The Erasure Initiative and After the Lights Go Out. Lili has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, and is a passionate advocate for YA and ...

Lachlann Carter is co-founder of 100 Story Building, a centre for young writers in Footscray that has 99 floors below ground accessible via a secret trapdoor.

Before he started working in Melbourne’s deepest building, he worked on Melbourne’s tallest ship, the Polly Woodside, as a not-very-smart pirate.

Christine Gordon is the Programming Manager of Melbourne’s pre-eminent independent bookshop, Readings, and has been in that role for over a decade. She considers this the best job in Australia. Christine was one of the founding members of the Stella Prize, sits on the Readings Foundation board and has been a judge on various literary awards. She is passionate about Australian literature and  ensuring that reading continues to allow endless possibilities for everyone.

Marian Blythe is director of Australia's premier independent comic art festival, Homecooked, and is publicity manager at Black Inc. books.

She wrote, produced, and performed in the sellout storytelling show Lose the Plot at Melbourne Fringe Festival, and has hosted numerous radio and podcast shows. She can sometimes be found teaching digital media and promotion, or as the enigmatic lead singer of a non-existent Melbourne punk band.

Shalini Kunahlan is Marketing Manager at Melbourne-based independent Text Publishing. She has worked in publishing for over a decade – her interests include digital marketing and bettering diversity outcomes within publishing. She is the inaugural winner of the ABIA Rising Star Award.

Sam Cooney runs the literary organisation TLB, which houses the independent book publishing press Brow Books and quarterly literary magazine The Lifted Brow, as well as running a website, writing prizes, events, and more. He is publisher-in-residence at RMIT, teaches sessionally at several universities, and is a freelance writer and literary critic.

In 2017 he took part in the Australia Council’s ‘Future Leaders’ professional development program, and in 2018 he was a member of the Australia Council publishing delegation tour of India, and travelled to the United States and the UK on Australia Council funded research trips about not-for-profit trade publishing, and was invited into the inaugural Foundry658 Accelerator program run by the State Library of Victoria and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) as part of the Victorian Government’s Creative State strategy.

Jax Brown (they/them) is an esteemed disability and LGBTQIA+ rights activist, writer, educator and consultant. Their tireless commitment to LGBTIQA+ disability human rights and advocacy has been recognised with a ...

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, the award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the poetry collections Carrying The World and How Decent Folk Behave, and many other books ...

Elizabeth Flux is an award-winning writer and editor whose fiction and nonfiction work has been widely published. She is a judge for the 2019 Award for and Unpublished Manuscript for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and is an editor for Melbourne City of Literature’s ‘Reading Victoria’ project. In 2017 she was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, was a judge for the Scribe Prize, was the winner of the inaugural Feminartsy Fiction Prize, and her short story ‘One’s Company’ was selected for Best Australian Stories 2017.

Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar woman whose family have belonged to the south coast of Western Australia since long before history started being recorded. Claire writes fiction, essays, poetry and art writing while either ...

Justine Hyde is a writer, critic and librarian who lives in Melbourne. Her criticism, essays and short fiction are published in the Age/Sydney Morning Herald, the Saturday Paper, Meanjin, LitHub, Electric Literature, Kill Your Darlings and a range of anthologies.

Candy Bowers is an award-winning writer, actor, social-activist, comedian and producer. The co-artistic director of Black Honey Company, Candy has pioneered a fierce sub-genre of hip hop theatre that delves into the heart of ...

Emilie Collyer lives on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her writing is widely published in Australia and internationally. Her poetry collection Do you have anything less domestic? (Vagabond Press 2022) won the inaugural ...

Kirsty Murray is a multi-award winning author of 25 books for children and young adults. Her works include eleven novels as well as picture books, non-fiction and junior fiction titles. Kirsty’s books are widely studied in schools ...

Eleanor Jackson is a Filipino Australian poet, performer, arts producer and sometimes community radio broadcaster. She is the author of Gravidity and Parity, winner of Small Press Network’s Book of the Year (2022), ...

Alia Gabres is a Melbourne based creative producer, cultural broker and storyteller.

She has worked with diverse and creative communities in Melbourne in various roles such as Lead Creative Producer for Industry and Creative Initiatives at the Footscray Community Arts Centre, and Lead Youth Arts and Events Producer for the City of Brimbank.

She has recently completed a residency at the New Jersey Performing Arts Centre in the USA, exploring new frameworks for broader and more diverse engagement in the arts.

She has designed and delivered innovative programming such as the ‘West Writers’ programme in Melbourne's Western suburbs, and worked as Lead Producer on the innovative the ‘Creatively Ageing’ programme and the international Women of the World Festival in 2017.

In 2016 she was invited to attend the Makassar International Writers Festival in Indonesia and 2015 saw Alia awarded as one of Melbourne Writers Festivals ’30 Under 30’, attend the Africa Writes Festival in the UK and complete a residency at the School for Social Sciences in Eritrea.

In 2014 Alia was in residence in Indonesia with Kunci Cultural Institute delivering a project that mapped traditional stories and recipes. In the same year she was program coordinator on the Global Express program that launched ‘Dialect’ a multi-lingual publication for emerging writers.

In 2013 Alia was invited as teaching artist with the Minor Disturbance Youth Slam team in Denver Colorado and co-produced an intergenerational narrative project in California. 2013 also saw Alia’s poetry video ‘Cotton Summer Dresses’ selected as a finalist of the National Blake Prize.

Alia has a Masters in Community and Cultural development at the Victorian College of the Arts. Alia is also currently a member of the Program Advisory Committee for the Creative Writing Degree at RMIT University. She has sat on Literature, Community Arts and Cultural Development and Multi-Art Form assessment panels for Creative Victoria and the national funding body for the arts, the Australia Council.