Greg Woodland leans towards genre writing. Mostly crime, thriller, black comedy and noir. The darker the better. His debut crime novel The Night Whistler was published by Text Publishing in 2020 and shortlisted for the 2021 Ned Kelly Awards, Best Debut Crime Fiction. The sequel The Carnival Is Over was published by Text in 2022. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Ned Kelly Awards, Best Crime Fiction. Greg has won several writing awards including the Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship (2004), the Varuna NSW Writers Centre Fellowship (2013) for his novel Pangs, the Varuna Litlink Fellowship (2014), the Bundanon Artist’s Residency Fellowship (2015) for The Night Whistler, and the 2017 ASA Writers Mentorship for Fiction. Greg has previously written and directed several award-winning short films (Tripe, Sharky’s Party, Green, Target Audience, Your Turn) and docos including Chasing Birds. Greg has written ten feature scripts and taught screenwriting at Macquarie Uni, UTS, NIDA, Australian Film Base and AFTRS, both online courses and weekend workshops. As the founder-director of Australia’s leading script development business, Script Central since 2003, Greg has edited many produced scripts including ‘Shayda’, ‘Moon Rock for Monday’, ‘Don’t Tell’, ‘Broken’, ‘Needle’, ‘The Bet’, ‘Cold Turkey' and completed over 2,000 script assessments.
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Website: https://gregwoodland.com.au

Ashley Kalagian Blunt is a bestselling author and speaker living with chronic illness. Her psychological thriller, Dark Mode, is published in Australia and the UK, and forthcoming in Germany and South Korea. Her previous books are How to Be Australian, a memoir, and My Name Is Revenge, a thriller novella and collected essays. My Name Is Revenge was shortlisted for the 2019 Woollahra Digital Literary Awards and was a finalist in the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. Her writing appears in Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, Overland, Australian Book Review, Sydney Morning Herald, Openbook, Kill Your Darlings, and more. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Impress Prize for New Writers and the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award. An award-winning speaker, Ashley has appeared at Sydney Writers’ Festival and Brisbane Writers’ Festival, and is a Moth StorySLAM winner. She co-hosts James and Ashley Stay at Home, a podcast about writing, creativity and health, and was a judge in the 2020 Writing NSW Varuna Fellowship. With a decade of experience in teaching and curriculum design, she now teaches creative writing courses and mentors emerging writers. She has a Master of Research in creative writing.
Website: https://www.ashleykalagianblunt.com

Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer and author of Song of the Sun God, The Barrier and Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2023. Song of the Sun God was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award (2019) and short-listed for Sri Lanka's Fairway National Literary Award (2018). The Barrier was short-listed for the Norma K Hemming Award for Speculative Fiction (2018). Song of the Sun God is being adapted for television, starring Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran (no relation). Her next two novels will be published in 2024. Her short stories have been published in the critically acclaimed anthologies, Another Australia and Sweatshop Women (Vol 2) by Affirm Press/Sweatshop and she is the deputy chair of Writing NSW. Shankari has spent two decades working as a lawyer in the social justice field, on national and international program design and delivery. She continues her work in social impact for an Australian national retailer. She is based in Sydney, Australia.
Website: https://shankarichandran.com

Emily Maguire is the author of six novels, including the Stella Prize and Miles Franklin shortlisted An Isolated Incident, and three non-fiction books. Emily’s articles and essays on sex, feminism, culture and literature have been published widely including in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Observer and The Age. Emily works as a teacher and as a mentor to emerging and established writers, was the 2018/2019 Writer-in-Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney and is the 2023 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. Her latest book is the novel Love Objects.
Website: https://www.emilymaguire.com.au

Ivy Ireland is the author of the poetry collections Incidental Complications (2007), Porch Light (2015), The Owl Inside (2020) and Tide (forthcoming, 2023). Ivy’s literary awards include the Australian Young Poet Fellowship, the Olga Masters Short Story Award, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize, the Thunderbolt Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize local award, and runner-up in the UC International Poetry Prize. Ivy completed her PhD in 2012 and her poetry, short fiction, essays and reviews have been widely published in journals and anthologies. Ivy enjoys teaching, editing and running workshops for aspiring writers.
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Kavita Bedford is an Australian-Indian writer with a background in media, anthropology and literature. She is passionate about telling stories from new perspectives that are traditionally left out of the mainstream. Her first novel, Friends & Dark Shapes, was published in 2021 in USA, Italy and Australia to critical response including reviews in The New York Times, The Guardian, and was Shortlisted for the Queensland and NSW Premiers’ Literary Awards and Small Press Network’s Book of the Year. She was the 2021 Writer in Residence at The Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. She was the Editor of The Point Magazine for MNSW, which explored countering violent extremism and she was the creative producer of a digital media project exploring diverse stories from South-West Sydney. She has worked as a research fellow for UTS on digital diasporas and she was a Churchill Fellow exploring migrant narratives between Australia and Europe. Her non-fiction and short stories have appeared in numerous publications including Guernica, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Griffith Review. She teaches across anthropology, journalism, writing, and Hatha yoga and loves focusing on issues of voice, place, authenticity, representation, writing practice and embodied creativity.
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Website: https://www.kavitabedford.com

Hilary Bell is an award-winning playwright, lyricist and librettist. Her plays and musicals have been produced nationally by Griffin, Ensemble, Sydney Theatre Company, Black Swan, the Sydney Opera House, Arts Centre Melbourne, Deckchair, La Boite, State Theatre Company of South Australia, City Recital Hall, NORPA, Darlinghurst Theatre Company, National Theatre of Parramatta, NIDA and Vitalstatistix; in the US by Atlantic and Steppenwolf; in the UK by the National Theatre. Hilary has written audio-scripts for the Museum of Contemporary Art and the State Library of NSW. The recipient of awards including the inaugural Philip Parsons, the Jill Blewitt, a Helpmann and two AWGIES, and shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Hilary is co-creator of several picture books, including Numerical Street, Summer Time and bestseller Alphabetical Sydney with Antonia Pesenti. She is a member of 7-On Playwrights and a graduate of the Juilliard Playwrights’ Program, NIDA and AFTRS. She was the Tennessee Williams Fellow 2003-04 and the 2012 Patrick White Playwrights’ Fellow at the STC. She has served on boards including Griffin, ANPC and Australian Plays, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the State Library of NSW. She loves visiting schools and running workshops around her picture books.
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Website: https://hilarybell.org/

Story analyst and playwright Timothy Daly is one of Australia’s most internationally-produced playwrights, with a string of national and international productions and awards to his credit. Actors such as Academy-Award winners Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush have appeared in his plays. His play, Derrida In Love, was written expressly for the 2011 & 2013 Academy Award nominee, Jacki Weaver, which she performed in a sold-out production in Sydney. His play Kafka Dances has won over a dozen national and international awards since its première, and is the most internationally-performed Australian play of all time. His play The Man in the Attic was awarded Australia’s most prestigious award for a new play, the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award. Timothy Daly’s 500-page book 21st Century Playwriting was published in 2019 by Smith & Kraus, New York’s top theatre book publisher. With over 30 years experience in writing, Timothy Daly has conducted many workshops in writing, narrative and dramatic structure on three continents, and has consulted with hundreds of writers and advised on hundreds of stories, novels, plays and scripts.
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Website: http://timothydalywriter.com

Amy Lovat is the author of Mistakes and Other Lovers (Pan Macmillan 2023) and the founder of online bookstore Secret Book Stuff. She has a PhD from the University of Newcastle where she's taught creative writing and the humanities for almost a decade. Amy is a professional editor and proofreader and has worked as a copywriter, subeditor and ghostwriter. She’s the former Program Manager of Writing NSW and current Program Manager of the Newcastle Writers Festival. Amy loves mentoring emerging writers, helping people tell stories with heart, and immersing herself in books and words.
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Website: https://amylovat.com