Moreblessing Maturure is a Zimbabwean/Australian inter-disciplinary artist, TEDx Speaker and the Creative Director of FOLK Magazine. Her work across literature, stage and screen has included engagements with Playwriting Australia, Australian Theatre for Young People, and Sydney Theatre Company (STC). She is currently developing new works including Screen Australia-funded series: ‘Afro Sistahs‘ and a new play […]

Lliane Clarke is an experienced publisher, writer, ghost-writer, editor and journalist with over 20 years of experience in publishing in print and online. She has a passion for story-telling and helping writers to bring to life the stories they want to tell. Lliane has managed major authors across a variety of genres from biography, cookery […]

Leonie Tyle has been associated with children’s books for over 25 years as a librarian, reviewer, speaker, and publisher. For thirteen years she was responsible for UQP’s children’s and young adults list, publishing approximately sixteen books a year, from picture books to young adult fiction and nonfiction. She set up Woolshed Press, an imprint of Random […]

Kate O’Donnell is a highly experienced freelance editor. Kate O’Donnell has been an editor since 2006, initially for HarperCollins Publishers Australia. In 2010 she became a freelancer, and now edits authors such as Jackie French, Judy Nunn and Jesse Blackadder. She works for HarperCollins Publishers, Random House Australia, Allen & Unwin, Simon & Schuster, Momentum Books, Magabala Books and Fremantle Press, as a manuscript assessor for the New South Wales Writers’ […]

Patrick Mangan is a senior editor at Penguin Random House and is also the author of two non-fiction books, So Close and Offsider. Patrick Mangan is one of Writing NSW’s manuscript assessors for non-fiction.

Amanda Niehaus is a biologist and writer living in Brisbane. Her work uses science as metaphor to inspire new perspectives and empathy. Her essays and stories have appeared in Overland, Griffith Review, Creative Nonfiction and Best Australian Essays, among others; won the 2017 VU Short Story Prize; and were twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. […]

Emma Lancaster is an award-winning digital storyteller who believes in the power of audio to inform, move and engage individuals and communities. She is now the executive producer at Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney, and previously spent five years working in broadcast radio and digital-first audio at the ABC. She undertook news […]

Lili Wilkinson is the award-winning author of 12 YA novels, including Pink, Green Valentine and After the Lights Go Out. She has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, where she supervises creative writing postgraduates. She established insideadog.com.au and the Inky Awards at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria.

Vanessa Kirkpatrick is an award-winning poet and writer. Her first poetry collection, To Catch the Light, won the John Knight Poetry Manuscript Prize. Her second collection, The Conversation of Trees, was published in 2017. She has a PhD in English literature and is an experienced teacher and creative writing mentor.