Abigail has run Bothersome Words since 2004. She has edited for Australian publishers including HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Harlequin, Allen and Unwin, and Echo Publishing, as well as UK publishers including Angry Robot, Hachette and Gollancz, and small press in the USA. She works regularly with emerging and self-publishing writers as an […]

Alan Baxter is a multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers, and dark fantasy. This Is Horror podcast calls him ‘Australia’s master of literary darkness’ and the Talking Scared podcast dubbed him ‘The Lord of Weird Australia’. He’s also a martial arts expert, a whisky-soaked swear monkey, and dog lover.

Ally Burnham is an AWGIE winning screenwriter and novelist best known for her feature film Unsound (2020, Netflix), nominated for Best Original Feature at the 2020 AWGIE awards and Best Indie Feature at the 2020 AACTA awards. A NIDA graduate (2016, Masters Writing for Performance), she is the lead writer for Metropius, a multi-media franchise […]

Andrew Frost is the author of End of Days, the forthcoming Among Friends and short fiction and creative non-fiction stories in a variety of places, including Iceberg Journal, Zoetrope: All Story and Global Short Stories Anthology.

Anna started her publishing career as editor for a literary agency in London. As Fiction Publisher for HarperCollins and Voyager she looks after a wide list of Australian authors including Dervla McTiernan, Dinuka McKenzie, Belinda Alexandra, Kylie Chan, Daniel O’Malley and more. She is looking for fresh spins on classic tropes in fantasy and spec […]

Anthony O’Connor is an Australian writer of genre-bending movies and books. He wrote original screenplays for the inner-city black comedy Angst and the blood-soaked office horror Redd Inc. (aka Inhuman Resources in the US/UK). More recently, O’Connor released the post-apocalyptic cult classic novel Straya (currently in development as an animated series) and genre-bending YA ghost […]

Cat Sparks is a multi-award-winning Australian author, editor and artist. Career highlights include attaining a PhD in science fiction and climate fiction, five years as fiction editor of Cosmos Magazine, running Agog! Press, studying with Margaret Atwood, 75 published short stories, a collection and a far future novel, Lotus Blue. She’s a regular panellist and […]

Garth Nix is a New York Times bestselling author of many books, and numerous short stories. He has won the Aurealis Award, Ditmar, Mythopoeic and others. His work is published around the world, in 42 languages. More than six million copies of his work have been sold.

J Ashley-Smith is a British–Australian author of dark fiction. His first book, The Attic Tragedy, won the Shirley Jackson Award. Other stories have won the Ditmar, Australian Shadows and Aurealis awards. He lives with his wife and two sons beneath an ominous mountain in the suburbs of North Canberra, gathering moth dust, tormented by the […]

JS Breukelaar is an American-Australian author living in Sydney with her family. She is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and a multiple Aurealis and Ditmar winner with fiction in numerous publications including The Dark, Black Static, Fantasy, Tiny Nightmares and several Years Bests.

Joanne Anderton is an award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror, but also kids’ books and creative non-fiction. Her recent collections are Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear and The Art of Broken Things. She’s currently doing a PhD at UQ, where she’s attempting to use speculative fiction to write memoir and having far too […]

Multi-award winner Kaaron Warren has published five novels and seven short story collections. She’s sold over 200 short stories to publications big and small around the world and has appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best anthologies. She was guest of honour at World Fantasy, Stokercon, and Geysercon.

Keith Stevenson is the author of the SF thriller Horizon (HarperCollins), publisher with coeur de lion publishing, past editor of Aurealis Magazine and Dimension6 and host of the Terra Incognita Speculative Fiction podcast. His new novel Traitor’s Run, the first book in The Lenticular space opera trilogy, is out on 1 October 2023.

Kristyn Maslog-Levis is the author of the bestselling YA Engkantasia series published by Anvil Publishing. A former journalist, Kristyn finished her master’s degree in communication at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore under the ASEAN scholarship. Kristyn started her Doctor of Philosophy candidature in 2021 with UTS for Creative Writing, focusing on cultural diversity in children’s […]

Maria Lewis is an AWGIE award-winning screenwriter, best-selling author, and pop culture etymologist. She’s the writer of the Supernatural Sisters series, which includes the Aurealis award-winning The Witch Who Courted Death, slasher The Graveyard Shift and Mockingbird: Strike Out for Marvel. As a screenwriter, she has worked on projects for Netflix, AMC, DC Comics, Ubisoft, […]

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. […]

Richard Harland has had 17 spec fic novels published by Allen & Unwin, Penguin, Pan Macmillan and Scholastic. Worldshaker, Liberator, and Song of the Slums were also published in the US, UK, France, and Germany. Next book out is the all-new Ferren and the Angel. He has won six Aurealis Awards, the A Bertram Chandler […]

Rik (Richard) Lagarto began his professional career as a theatre director. After 12 years, Rik moved into game development as a game designer, eventually specialising in narrative design and writing. Rik has worked on titles such as the Total War series, Star Wars: Republic Heroes, Bioshock2, Yonder and Yonder. Rik currently works as narrative lead […]

An editor by trade, Rochelle Fernandez is now an agent at Alex Adsett Literary. She was a publisher for Voyager, HarperCollins’s speculative fiction imprint from 2013-17.

TR Napper is a multi-award-winning science fiction author including Aurealis twice. Before turning to writing, Napper was an aid worker, delivering humanitarian programs in Southeast Asia for a decade. Currently he lives in Australia, where – in addition to writing – he works as a Dungeon Master for a local charity, running campaigns for young […]

Zachary Ashford is an educator, an occasional speaker, and the author of the Aurealis nominated post-apocalyptic novella When the Cicadas Stop Singing. His debut novel Polyphemus is out in July.