‘Research allows us to write about subjects which we are not already experts in… It allows writing to be imbued with the kinds of details which bring the reader into the worlds we’ve created and make those worlds fascinating.’

‘A good opening sentence is simple, raises questions or is surprising in some way. It is an invitation to the reader to enter the story; how you present that invitation is important.’

“We writers need to be near-virtuosic in our language because it’s a matter of how a story is told as much as what the story is.”

‘It’s exciting to encounter, through a memoir, a life lived in a way completely different to our own. It’s also reassuring to see our own experiences shared and reflected by others.’

‘Interior Australia is awash with fragmented perspectives and competing narratives that could only exist there. The best rural Australian novels embrace this by making the landscape more than just setting – they make it as vital to the book as character or plot.’

‘Rereading is an important mode of reading – taking in patterns until they become part of the fabric of your thoughts, learning how language and story and people’s minds work.’

‘The interplay between the desire for brevity and longer forms has always been something poets have been able to play with…poetry is infinitely flexible, it gives us so many ways to reach out to the reader.’

‘This isn’t about clouds parting to beam in words channelled by angelic beings… so much as the process of story-making becoming magnetic and natural. One of the most gratifying elements of writing is getting out of the way of ourselves, to discover what we didn’t know we knew. This happens when we write words and ideas that we might not have believed ourselves consciously capable of constructing.’

‘I love speculative fiction the same way I love all fiction – for the joy of being free to let my imagination roam and to see possible new worlds and ways of being…Science fiction is joyfully mind bending, horror awakens a deep emotional response, and I love the feeling of breathtaking limitlessness in fantasy, either that which takes place in secondary worlds or which makes one or two key changes in my own.’