Elizabeth McMahon teaches and researches Australian literature and Island Studies at UNSW and is the editor of Southerly, Australia’s oldest literary journal. Her recent monograph Islands Identity and the Literary Imagination (2016) won two national awards and she is currently completing a book on cross-dressing in Australian Literature. She has co-edited three book collections: Remembering Patrick White; Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays; and Women Making Time. She is co-editing […]

French-Australian writer Sophie Masson is the award-winning and internationally-published author of over sixty books for children, young adults and adults. Sophie is a founding partner and publishing director of Christmas Press, an acclaimed publisher founded in Armidale in 2013, producing children’s illustrated books and children’s fiction in three imprints. A former Chair of the Australian […]

Originally from San Francisco, Pamela Malpas has been a New York-based agent for more than 20 years and currently holds a position with the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. Over her career Pamela has worked with legendary literary estates and in the areas of suspense, thrillers, contemporary mystery and YA fiction. In addition to her US […]

Anna Low is an independent bookseller with 25 years experience. She has owned and run the Potts Point Bookshop in Sydney since 2007. She is a former Miles Franklin judge and currently serves on the board of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and the ABA Kids’ Reading Guide panel. In 2016 she was the Text Bookseller […]

For ten years, Mitchell put off his dream of writing, then he quit his job and wrote A Crucible of Souls, winner of the 2013 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel. He now writes full-time, has published 12 novels, and is eternally grateful to the readers who took a chance on an unknown self-published author. […]

Ashley Hay is a Brisbane-based novelist and essayist whose awards include the Foundation of Australian Literary Studies’ Colin Roderick Award and the Peoples’ Choice from the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (for The Railwayman’s Wife), and the Bragg/UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing. Her latest novel is A Hundred Small Lessons. She is the editor of Griffith Review.

Beth Driscoll is Senior Lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Her research on the publishing industry and contemporary fiction includes the book The New Literary Middlebrow and articles in Memoires du Livre/Studies in Book Culture, Continuum, the European Journal of Cultural Studies and the Journal of Popular Culture. She is a Chief Investigator on […]

Sam Cooney is publisher at independent book press Brow Books and quarterly literary magazine {The Lifted Brow} and is publisher-in-residence at RMIT University. In 2017 he took part in the Australia Council’s ‘Future Leaders’ professional development program, and last year he took part in the Australia Council publishing delegation tour of India, travelled to the USA […]

Alice Grundy is associate publisher at Brio Books and co-founder of Seizure, an incubator of Australian writing. For the past decade, she has worked in trade publishing with a focus on developing new talent. She has run workshops at festivals, universities and schools in Australia, India and China and written for the Sydney Review of […]