Rock Bottom

Arif Anwar was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and is now based in Toronto. He has worked on issues of poverty alleviation for BRAC, one of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations, and on public health for UNICEF Myanmar. The Storm is his first novel.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei, brought up in Malaysia and now lives in London. His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel. It was long-listed for the Booker Prize, as was his third novel, Five Star Billionaire. His new novel is We, the Survivors.

Long Litt Woon was born in Malaysia and is now an anthropologist and certified Mushroom Expert in Norway. She went to Norway in her youth as an exchange student, where she met and later married a Norwegian, Eiolf Olsen, settling in Oslo. The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning is her first book.

Sophie McNeill is a Walkley Award-winning investigative reporter for ABC’s Four Corners. A former ABC foreign correspondent based in the Middle East, she's worked across the region, including in countries such as Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Turkey and Gaza. Sophie has twice been awarded Australian Young TV Journalist of the Year and previously worked as a reporter for ABC's Foreign Correspondent and SBS's Dateline program and is a former host of Triple J's news and current affairs program Hack. We Can't Say We Didn't Know is her first book.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a writer, journalist, and researcher in constitutional and human rights law.  Her first book, I Choose Elena, is based on her celebrated Meanjin essay of the same name.

Julia Phillips lives in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, Disappearing Earth, has been published in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Poland, and China, and was shortlisted for the 2019 US Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her Pushcart-nominated fiction has been widely published in literary journals and her nonfiction has appeared in publications including The Atlantic and Slate. She spent a year as a Fulbright fellow in Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, where Disappearing Earth is set.

Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction. Her 2013 novel Fools was long-listed for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and her 2019 novel, Improvement, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Joan lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad grew up in Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the American South. He has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and currently splits his time between Bangkok and Brooklyn. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is his first novel, and was shortlisted for the 2019 US Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.