Marcella Polain was born in Singapore, and migrated to Australia with her Armenian mother and Irish father. She lives and works on unceded Wadjuk Noongar land. Marcella has a background in theatre and screen. She has published four poetry collections and two novels, as well as short fiction and braided essays. Her work has won the Anne Elder Poetry Award, has twice won the Patricia Hackett Prize, and been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, the WA Premier’s Poetry Prize and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She has also been a recipient of an Australia Council grant. With visual artist Paul Uhlmann, Marcella co-founded fold editions, dedicated to the creation of hand-made books. She has been awarded the Gold Medal by the Writers Association of Armenia and has been published internationally and in translation.

Marcella has particular interest in trauma, migration, exile, genocide (including the Armenian Genocide), counter-narrative, resistance, hybridity, and liminality. She has taught Creative Writing for over 30 years at universities in Western Australia and now holds an Honorary position at Edith Cowan University. In that time, Marcella has worked with more than three dozen emerging writers – in the community and in postgraduate courses – supervising, mentoring, and helping to shape and edit manuscripts for publication. (Her work with postgraduate students was recognised with the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research Supervision.) The writers she has worked with include: Kaya Ortiz, Brendan Ritchie, Holden Sheppard, Nandi Chinna, Shevaun Cooley, Elizabeth Lewis, Jennifer Kornberger, Karleah Olson, Jo Pollitt, and Christopher Konrad.

Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award (for her novel Serengotti), and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. She’s an Adjunct Fellow at the University of Tasmania, and a 2024 Hedberg Writer-in-Residence.

Eugen’s approach to mentoring: Equate advising a writer that their work is inadequate to telling a mother that her baby is ugly. To be published, the writer must, inevitably, give others entry to their precious world. The right mentor—author, supervisor, peer reviewer or editor— will position the artist to arrive at an articulate product. A repressive mentor is dangerous because they may, for more than a moment, stifle creative energy, humiliate the writer, perhaps usurp authorship, and inevitably lead to unproductive outcomes. An adventurous mentor nurtures, peaks ability, and introduces important tensions, surging from vital interrogations and finding answers to them, tensions that add value to the writing. I am an award-winning and experienced author, editor, teacher and mentor. I would like to think of myself as a mentor who is an axis for growth, one most focused in a respectful partnership that helps to draw out the best form of the author’s work now and into the future.

Maame Blue is the author of two novels; Bad Love, which won the 2021 Betty Trask award, and The Rest Of You, longlisted for the 2025 Jhalak Prose Prize. Her short stories have appeared in three anthologies, with another forthcoming in Be Gay, Do Crime in 2025. She has written for multiple publications including The Bookseller, Writers Mosaic and The Independent. She regularly mentors emerging writers working on their debut novels and nonfiction proposals, recently offering her services to Faber Academy UK and Kill Your Darlings in Australia. Maame has been a reader for multiple short story competitions including The Commonwealth Prize, The Brick Lane Short Story Prize and was a 2024 judge for the John Florio Prize. She regularly runs creative writing workshops and has taught for many places including Writing New South Wales, Writers Victoria, Kill Your Darlings and more. She splits her time between London and Melbourne.

Mireille Juchau is a novelist, essayist and critic. Her third novel, The World Without Us, won the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Her essays, reviews and short fiction are widely published, most recently in The Monthly, newyorker.com, Tablet, Sydney Review of Books, Best Australian Essays and LA Review of Books. She has taught at several universities and in the community and has a PhD in literature. Mireille has also worked as an editor, at HEAT Magazine, RealTime and on several other publications.