In 2020, Writers’ Week contemplated one of the few things that incontrovertibly unites us all: Being Human.
Many thanks to all of our audience, and the authors, poets, journalists, historians, scientists, politicians and academics from around the country and the world who congregated in Adelaide to be part of our annual conversation.
In these strange and deeply unsettling times, many important and illuminating discussions took place in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens. We invite you to listen to – or relive – them via our podcasts, which can be accessed below. Details of our full 2020 program also remain available for reference and archival purposes.
PRESENTING PARTNERS
Nicole Abadee is the books writer for The Australian Review Magazine and also writes about books for Good Weekend. She appears regularly at writers’ festivals and other literary events. Nicole is also a literary consultant, helping writers to polish their work and to get published.
Joanna Agius is a proud Narungga woman and a Deaf performer and artist from South Australia. Her passion is to preserve Dreaming stories via Auslan/Aboriginal sign language format. This includes visual vernacular which is a theatrical art form of physical expression storytelling with a strong sense of body movements, gestures and facial expressions, enabling cultural inclusion and developing language access for Aboriginal Deaf Children as well as people around them.
Jokha Alharthi is the author of two previous collections of short fiction, a children's book, and three novels, and teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat. She is the only Arabic author to win the International Booker Prize, awarded to her novel Celestial Bodies in 2019.
Jessica Alice is a poet, editor and writer. She is Director of Writers SA, the peak organisation for literature in South Australia.
Dennis Altman is currently Emeritus Professor and Professorial Fellow in Human Security at La Trobe University. He is the author of thirteen books, most recently Queer Wars and his memoir Unrequited Love: Diary of an Accidental Activist. Altman has been President of the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific and is a patron of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives and the Pride Foundation.
Stuart, a Scotsman now living here in Adelaide for four years, is a primary school teacher, working with deaf children and he has a passion for translating English stories into Auslan. Stuart is working with a group of established writers including Manal Younus and Sean Williams, exploring aspects of storytelling using sign language, especially for children.
Rachel A. Ankeny is professor of history and philosophy, Deputy Dean Research in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide and honorary visiting professor in the College of Social Science and International Studies (Philosophy) at the University of Exeter. She convenes the Food Values Research Group and the Public Engagement in Science and Technology Adelaide (PESTA), and co-founded the International Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice.
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.
Robyn Archer is a multi-award-winning singer, writer, artistic director and public advocate for the arts. She has performed in numerous Adelaide Festivals since 1976, including 2019’s Picaresque, and was artistic director for 1998 and 2000. She has been honoured by the French and Belgian governments and holds honorary doctorates from six Australian universities.
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.
Paul Barclay is a Walkley Award winning journalist and broadcaster with an appetite for ideas and in-depth analysis and discussion. Paul has produced countless stories over more than 20 years for an array of programs on virtually all ABC radio networks.
Damian Barr is an award-winning writer and columnist and host of a famed literary salon at the Savoy in London. His first book, Maggie & Me, was an award-winning memoir about coming of age and coming out in Thatcher's Britain. You Will Be Safe Here is his debut novel.
Paul is an Adelaidean born and bred who has lived in different places including London, returning 4 years ago. He is an avid sci-fi fan and has written many stories though he hasn’t published anything yet. He likes to imagine the near future featuring technology which has evolved from what we have today, so he likes to look ahead one or two generations of where we are right now!
Graeme Base has been writing and illustrating for children for over thirty years, with worldwide bestsellers Animalia, The Eleventh Hour and The Waterhole known and loved by millions around the world. The recipient of numerous Australian and international publishing awards, and with global sales exceeding six million copies, he has established himself as one of Australia's pre-eminent creators of imaginative works for children.
Tony Birch is the author of books including Ghost River, which won the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and his new book The White Girl. He lives in Melbourne and is a Senior Research Fellow at Victoria University.
John Birmingham has written for Rolling Stone, Playboy, Long Bay Prison News, Quarterly Essay and The Monthly. His published works include the cult classic He Died With A Falafel In His Hand and the award-winning Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney. His essay On Father is a beautiful account of grief, depression and the death of his father.
Sophie Black is Head of Publishing at the Wheeler Centre. She is a previous Editor in Chief at Private Media, Director of the 2013 Adelaide Festival of Ideas and editor of Crikey.
Martijn Boersma is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Business at the University of Technology Sydney. He is interested in the intersection of business and society and has published widely on these topics. He previously had a seven year career with Greenpeace International in Amsterdam. Addressing Modern Slavery, co-authored with Justine Nolan, is his first book.
John Boyne is the author of eleven novels for adults, five for younger readers and a collection of short stories. His 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas sold 9 million copies worldwide and has been adapted for cinema, theatre, ballet and opera. John has won three Irish Book Awards and many other international literary awards and his novels are published in over 50 languages. He lives in Dublin.
Sienna Brown was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Canada. A daughter of Jamaican parents and lifelong storyteller, Sienna is a professional dancer, film editor and documentary director. She previously worked at Sydney Living Museums, where she first came across the story of William Buchanan, which became her first novel, Master of My Fate. She is currently working on her second novel.
Dr Antonio Buti is an academic, author and politician. He is currently the Member for Armadale in the Western Australian Parliament, and prior to this lectured in law at the University of Western Australia. An expert on the Stolen Generations, British child migrants, human rights and sports law, Dr Buti has published widely in these areas and his books include Sir Ronald Wilson: A Matter of Conscience and Stolen Life: The Bruce Trevorrow Case.
Maxine Beneba Clarke is a widely published Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. She won the Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) for Literary Fiction and the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction for Foreign Soil (2015) and the NSW Premier's Literary Multicultural Awards for her memoir, The Hate Race. Both were shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her poetry collection Carrying the World (2017) won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry. The Patchwork Bike, Maxine's first picture book with Van T. Rudd, was a CBCA Honour Book for 2017.
Dr Jennifer Caruso is an Eastern Arrente woman who lectures in Aboriginal cultures and histories. Her research focuses on the impacts of removal on the Stolen Generations.
Jo Case is an Adelaide-based writer, editor and bookseller, and the author of Boomer and Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s. She works at Imprints Booksellers and Wakefield Press.
Wai Chim is a first-generation Chinese-American from New York City. She grew up speaking Cantonese at home and absorbing Western culture through books, TV and school. Her previous books include the Chook Chook series and Shaozhen, part of the Through My Eyes: Natural Disaster Zone series. Her novel Freedom Swimmer was shortlisted for the inaugural Readings Young Adult Book Prize and the Sakura Medal, and was a Children's Book Council Notable Book.
Michael Christie’s debut novel, If I Fall, If I Die (2015), was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Kirkus Prize, and was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His essays and book reviews appear in publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post. Michael’s new book Greenwood is already a bestseller in his native Canada and was also long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Dr Natasha Cica is the founding Director of Kapacity.org.
Christopher Clark is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College. He is the author of books including The Politics of Conversion, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Iron Kingdom, and his latest book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 was named as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year and won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.
Danielle Clode is an award-winning author of narrative nonfiction, history and children’s books. Her most recent publications are The Wasp and the Orchid and From Dinosaurs to Diprotodons.
Tim Costello AO is one of Australia’s most respected community leaders and a sought after voice on social justice issues, leadership and ethics. He was Chief Executive of World Vision Australia for thirteen years, stepping down in 2016, and continues to place the challenges of global poverty on the national agenda. Tim is Senior Fellow for the Centre for Public Christianity.
Annabel Crabb is the ABC’s Chief Political Writer and presenter of Back in Time for Dinner, The House and the highly acclaimed Kitchen Cabinet series on ABC TV. Annabel has worked extensively in newspapers, radio and television. With Leigh Sales, she is the host of the wildly popular podcast Chat 10, Looks 3 and is the author of five books, including two cook books with long-time friend Wendy Sharpe, as well as two acclaimed Quarterly Essays, most recently Men at Work: Australia’s Parenthood Trap.
Hannah Critchlow is the Science Outreach Fellow at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, and has been named a Top 100 UK Scientist by the Science Council for her work in science communication. Mentioned by Nature magazine as a rising star in the life sciences in 2019, she is listed as one of the University of Cambridge's 'inspirational and successful women in science'. The Science of Fate: Why Your Future is More Predictable Than You Think is her first book.
Sophie Cunningham AM is the author of five books, most recently City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest. She is a former publisher and editor, was a co-founder of the Stella Prize and is now an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University’s Non/fiction Lab.
Throughout his distinguished career as a solicitor, advocate and politician Bernard Collaery has been a fearless advocate for human rights. He has acted for clients including the families of victims of the Thredbo landslide, the Royal Canberra Hospital demolition tragedy and the Glenbrook rail disaster, and provided legal advice to the East Timor Resistance for more than thirty years. He acted for East Timor at the International Court of Justice in relation to a maritime sea boundary dispute with Australia. Bernard was the Attorney General and Deputy Chief Minister for the Australian Capital Territory from 1989-1991. Oil Under Troubled Waters is his first book.
Paul Daley is a Sydney-based author, journalist and essayist. His books have been shortlisted for major Australian literary awards and his journalism has won numerous prizes including two Walkley Awards and two Kennedy Awards.
Blanche d’Alpuget is an acclaimed novelist, biographer and essayist. She has won numerous literary awards, including the inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature.
Professor Megan Davis is an Aboriginal leader, activist, academic, writer and lawyer.
Sharon Davis is a four-time Walkley award winning documentary producer and journalist whose body of work in television, radio and print spans more than 25 years. Most recently she developed and produced a new podcast The Monthly Hour for Schwartz Media.
Julia Donaldson has written some of the world's best-loved children's books, including The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child, which together have sold over 17 million copies worldwide. She was the UK Children’s Laureate 2011-13 and has been honoured with a CBE for Services to Literature.
Anthony Durkin is an Adelaide barrister. In 1975, aged 12, he telephoned Jeff Medwell’s talkback show on Radio 5DN to participate in a ‘Best Off the Cuff Speaker’ competition. Mr Medwell gave him the impromptu topic ‘My Hero’. Anthony spoke for the requisite minute on the subject of Don Dunstan. He won. His mum and dad still have the faux marble and plastic trophy.
Ali Cobby Eckermann’s first poetry collection little bit long time was written in the desert. Its 2009 publication launched her literary career. Her verse novel Ruby Moonlight won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and Book Of The Year at the 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and in 2014 she was the inaugural recipient of the Tungkunungka Pintyanthi Fellowship at Adelaide Festival Literary Awards. In 2017 Ali received a Windham-Campbell Award for Poetry from Yale University. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at RMIT Melbourne.
Chiké Frankie Edozien learned to read from the newspapers his father brought home while growing up in Lagos, Nigeria. He went onto become an ink-stain scribbler telling stories in service of a greater good. His memoir, Lives of Great Men, won the Lambda Literary 2018 Non- fiction Award for Best Gay Memoir/Biography.
Michael Earp is the editor of Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories and contributor to Underdog: #LoveOzYA Short Stories. He has a teaching degree and a Masters in children’s literature and has worked between bookselling and publishing for over seventeen years as a children’s literature specialist, currently at The Little Bookroom. His writing has appeared in The Victorian Writer and Aurealis.
Born in the Netherlands, Bart van Es now lives in England where he is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherine’s College. An expert on Shakespeare, he has written authoritative texts on Shakespeare’s work and times, including Shakespeare in Company (2013) and Shakespeare’s Comedies (2016). His most recent book is The Cut Out Girl, which won the 2019 Costa Book of the Year.
Anton Enus, a broadcast journalist with more than 25 years' experience, has been presenting SBS World News bulletins since 1999. In his spare time he's run more than 40 marathons and also plays tennis and squash. His favourite authors are Vikram Seth, JM Coetzee and Sebastian Faulks.
Romain Fathi, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in History at Flinders University and a Chercheur associé at the Centre d'Histoire de Sciences Po, Paris. He has taught and researched at several universities, including Sciences Po in France, Yale in the United States, and the University of Queensland in Australia. His primary research interests focus on the First World War, war commemorations and Australian identity. Our Corner of the Somme: Australia At Villers Bretonneux is his first book.
Tim Flannery is a paleontologist, explorer and conservationist, a leading writer on climate change, and the 2007 Australian of the Year. His books include the award-winning international bestseller The Weather Makers, Here on Earth, Atmosphere of Hope and, most recently the collection Life: Selected Writings. He is currently Chief Councillor of the Climate Council.
Chris Fleming is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, where he is also a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir On Drugs (2019) and has written widely on literature, philosophy, and culture. His most recent academic book is Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid (with Emma A. Jane).
Mandy Foot is a self-proclaimed animal nut and horse lover and works in a studio in the Adelaide Hills. Mandy's picture books for Lothian include the very popular Captain Kangaroo series and the bestsellers The Wheels on the Bus and Old Macdonald Had a Farm.
Steven Gale is a festival programmer and moderator based in London. He has worked at theatres in England and Scotland, and taught at universities in Ireland and the United States. From 2016 to 2018, Steven was a cultural events producer at the British Library. He has chaired over 450 author sessions at literary festivals worldwide.
Ross Garnaut is Professorial Research Fellow in Economics at the University of Melbourne. In 2008, he produced the Garnaut Climate Change Review for the Australian government. He is the author of many books, including the bestselling Dog Days (2013) and, most recently, Superpower: Australia’s Low Carbon Opportunity (2019).
Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Spare Room, This House of Grief and Everywhere I Look. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I 1978–1987 marks the publication of her first volume of diaries.
Ian Gibbins is a widely-published Adelaide poet, video artist and electronic musician working across diverse forms. He used to be a neuroscientist and Professor of Anatomy at Flinders University.
Anna Goldsworthy is the author of Piano Lessons, Welcome to Your New Life and the Quarterly Essay Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny. Her new book, Melting Moments, is her first novel. Her writing has appeared in The Monthly, The Age, The Australian, The Adelaide Review and Best Australian Essays. She is also a concert pianist, with several recordings to her name.
Kerryn Goldsworthy is an Adelaide writer and critic. She won the Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism in 2013, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay The Limit of the World. She is the author of Adelaide, in New South Publishing’s Cities series.
Peter Goldsworthy divides his working time between medicine and writing. His novels have sold over 400,000 copies in Australia alone, and his writing has been shortlisted and won major literary awards across a range of genres: poetry, short story, novels, theatre, and opera libretti. His most recent book is Minotaur.
Jane R Goodall is an Emeritus Professor with the Writing and Society Research Centre at the Western Sydney University. She has a diverse track record as a writer and commentator on the history and politics of cultural change, and has published both fiction and non-fiction. Her new book is The Politics of the Common Good.
Erin Gough is a Sydney-based writer whose work has been published globally and won many awards, including the 2019 Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature and the 2018 Readings Young Adult Book Prize for her second novel, Amelia Westlake.
Andy Griffiths is one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors. He and illustrator Terry Denton have collaborated on more than 30 bestselling books and sold over 10 million copies, won 80 children’s choice awards and 10 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA)—including Book of the Year for The 91-Storey Treehouse in 2015. He is also an ambassador for both The Indigenous Literacy Foundation and the Pyjama Foundation.
Tom Griffiths AO is an historian whose books and essays have won prizes in literature, history, science, politics and journalism. His books include Hunters and Collectors, Forests of Ash, Slicing the Silence, Living with Fire and The Art of Time Travel. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and has a Bundanon Writing Residency in 2020.
Habiburahman, known as Habib, is a Rohingya. Born in 1979 in Burma (now Myanmar), he escaped torture, persecution, and detention in his country, fleeing first to neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia, where he faced further discrimination and violence, and then to Australia, by boat. Habib spent 32 months in detention centres before being released. He now lives in Melbourne, where he collaborated with Sophie Ansel to write his memoir, First, They Erased Our Name, the first first-person account of the oppression of the Rohingya.
Ruby Hamad is a Lebanese-Syrian journalist and author raised and based in Sydney. Her work has appeared internationally in The Guardian, Prospect Magazine, and The New Arab, and locally in Crikey and The Saturday Paper. An article for The Guardian, “How White Women use Strategic Tears to Silence Women of Colour” from May 2018 went viral and inspired the writing of her first book, White Tears/Brown Scars.
Zahra Hankir is a Lebanese-British journalist who writes about the intersection of politics, culture and society in the Middle East. Her work has appeared in Vice, BBC News, Al Jazeera English, Bloomberg Businessweek, Roads & Kingdoms, and Literary Hub, among others. She is the editor of Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women reporting on the Arab World.
Joy Harjo is the US Poet Laureate. She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. Her seven books of poetry have garnered many awards, including the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her most recent publication is For a Girl Becoming, a young adult/coming of age book.
Emelia Haskey is a rising star on the Adelaide poetry scene as a 2017 and 2018 finalist of the Goolwa Poetry Cup, finalist of the SA Poetry Slam 2018 and winner of the slam in 2019, as well as the winner of the SAEFTA Spring Poetry Festival Senior Poetry prize. She is currently working on publishing her first collection and serving on the Friendly Street Poetry committee.
Vicki Hastrich is the Sydney-based writer of two acclaimed novels: Swimming with the Jellyfish and The Great Arch. Her new book is the essay collection, Night Fishing: Stingrays, Goya and the singular life.
Ashley Hay is an essayist and novelist based in Brisbane. Her most recent novel is A Hundred Small Lessons. She is the editor of Griffith Review.
Jess Hill is an investigative journalist who has been writing about domestic violence since 2014. Prior to this, she was a producer for ABC Radio, a Middle East correspondent for The Global Mail, and an investigative journalist for Background Briefing. She was listed in Foreign Policy's top 100 women to follow on Twitter, and her reporting on domestic violence has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards. See What You Made Me Do is her first book.
Shakira Hussein is the author of From Victims to Suspects: Muslim Women Since 9/11 and a contributor to the anthology #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement. She is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, and has published on topics including racism, gender violence and disability.
Linda Jaivin is the author of eleven books, including seven novels and the Quarterly Essay Found in Translation. She is also a cultural commentator, co-editor of the China Story Yearbook at the Australian National University, and literary and film translator.
Andrew Joyner is the illustrator and author of numerous children’s books, including the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Dr. Seuss’s The Horse Museum, The Pink Hat, The Hair Book (with Graham Tether), Duck and Hippo in the Rainstorm (with Jonathan London), and The Terrible Plop: A Picture Book (with Ursula Dubosarsky). He also wrote and illustrated the Boris series about an adventure-seeking warthog. His books are now published in more than twenty-five countries.
Tony Jones is one of Australia’s most renowned and recognisable journalists. He has reported for Four Corners and presented Lateline, winning Walkleys for both, and was the host of ABC's Q&A for 12 years until the end of 2019. He published his first novel -the best-selling thriller The Twentieth Man in 2017. In Darkness Visible is his second novel.
Amie Kaufman is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of science fiction and fantasy for young (and not so young) adults. Her multi-award winning work has been published in 30 countries, and been described as “a game-changer” (Shelf Awareness), “stylistically mesmerising” (Publishers Weekly) and “out-of-this-world awesome” (Kirkus). Amie lives in Melbourne with her husband and their rescue dog, Jack.
Anna Krien is the author of the award-winning Night Games and Into the Woods, as well as two Quarterly Essays, Us and Them and The Long Goodbye. Her new book, Act of Grace, is her first novel. Anna’s writing has been published in The Monthly, The Age, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Stories and The Big Issue. In 2014 she won the UK William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and in 2018 she received a Sidney Myer Fellowship.
Dr Meredith Lake is a writer and broadcaster interested in how Australians explore the big questions of faith and meaning. Her most recent book, The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History, won the Australian History prizes at the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the 2019 NSW Premier’s History Awards. She hosts Soul Search on ABC Radio National.
Laniyuk was born of a French mother and a Larrakia, Kungarrakan and Gurindji father. She contributed to Colouring the Rainbow: Blak Queer and Trans Perspectives and awarded the Indigenous residency (Canberra's Noted Writers Festival 2017, Overland’s Writers Residency 2018).
Vicki Laveau-Harvie was born in Canada, lived for many years in France and is now based in Australia. She has worked as a translator, a business editor and an academic. Her memoir, The Erratics, is her first book and won the 2018 Finch Memoir Prize and the 2019 Stella Prize. She has also won prizes for her short fiction and poetry.
Tali Lavi is a writer and reviewer whose work has appeared in publications including Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books, Overland and The Melbourne Review. She is Co-Director of Programming at Melbourne Jewish Book Week.
Benjamin Law is the author of the memoir The Family Law, which he adapted for SBS TV, Gaysia, and a Quarterly Essay: Moral Panic 101. A columnist for Fairfax’s Good Weekend magazine, Law has also written for over 50 publications internationally and is a co-host of ABC Radio National’s Stop Everything.
Bri Lee is a writer and editor whose work has been published in The Monthly, Harper's Bazaar Australia, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The Guardian and more. Her first book Eggshell Skull won the 2019 ABIA for Biography of the Year. Her latest work, Beauty, is a meditation on body image.
Luka Lesson is a poet who has performed with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, had poems studied in Australian curriculums and runs his own poetry retreat in Greece every year. Luka's latest solo work Agapi & Other Kinds of Love will premiere in 2020.
Caro Llewellyn is the author of autobiography Diving Into Glass and three previous works of nonfiction. Diving Into Glass has been longlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize. Caro is the former director of several large-scale literary festivals and cultural events. She has hosted writers from every corner of the globe, including a number of Nobel Prize winners, and presented events at the Sydney Opera House, London’s Southbank, the Louvre, and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Town Hall, 92Y and historic Cooper Union. She is currently working on a novel.
Antony Loewenstein is an author and journalist who has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, The Washington Post and The Nation. He is the author of Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe and wrote and co-produced the associated documentary. Other books include My Israel Question, Profits of Doom and his most recent book on the international drug trade, Pills, Powder, and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs.
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.
Scott Ludlam was an Australian Greens Senator for Western Australia from July 2008 to July 2017, and served as Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens. He was spokesperson for Communications, Housing and Sustainable Cities, Defence, and Nuclear Issues. He's a long-term anti-nuclear campaigner.
Wayne Macauley is a highly acclaimed novelist whose works include Some Tests, Demons, The Cook, Caravan Story and Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe. His most recent book, Simpson Returns, was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. He lives in Brunswick, Melbourne.
Sanam Maher is a journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan. For more than a decade, she has covered stories on Pakistan's art and culture, business, politics, religious minorities and women. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Caravan, Roads and Kingdoms and Buzzfeed. A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch is her first book.
David Marr has written for Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Saturday Paper, The Guardian and The Monthly, and has served as editor of the National Times, reporter for Four Corners and presenter of ABC TV’s Media Watch. His books include Patrick White: A Life, The High Price of Heaven, Dark Victory (with Marian Wilkinson), Panic and six bestselling Quarterly Essays, including his arresting essay on George Pell, The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell, recently updated and expanded into a book.
John Marsden has written more than 40 books, mostly for teenagers and children. He has sold over five million books worldwide, and has won every major award in Australia for young people's fiction. His 2015 book for adults, South of Darkness, won the Christina Stead Award for Best Novel. John's passionate interest in education led him to start two successful schools and his latest book is The Art of Growing Up, a non-fiction work about education and parenting.
Audrey Mason-Hyde is an actor, spoken word poet and public speaker. They have appeared in works including the ABC series F**king Adelaide, feature film 52 Tuesdays and the peer-created documentary A Field Guide to Being A 12-Year Old Girl won the Crystal Bear at the Berlinale Film Festival. Audrey was the 2018 Winner of Spoken Word SA’s inaugural Youth Slam Rumble.
Mohammed Massoud Morsi was born in Copenhagen to Egyptian parents. A writer, journalist and photographer, he has lived in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia before moving to Australia in 2011. His fiction and non-fiction works have appeared in Australian and international publications, and his most recent three stories have been published in the collection The Palace of Angels. Morsi now lives in Perth with his son.
Thomas Mayor is a Torres Strait Islander man born on Larrakia country in Darwin. Using the organising and negotiating skills he learned as a union official, he began campaigning for the rights of Indigenous peoples, becoming a signatory to the Uluru Statement from the Heart and embarking on an eighteen-month journey around the country to garner support for it. His book Finding the Heart of the Nation: The Journey of the Uluru Statement towards Voice, Treaty and Truth continues that campaign.
Tony McAleer is an international speaker, change maker, and father of two. A former leader in the North American white supremacist movement, he has since made it his mission to help people leave hate groups, and is the co-founder and Board Chair for the non-profit organisation Life After Hate. The Cure for Hate: A Former White Supremacist’s Journey from Violent Extremism to Radical Compassion is his first book. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Felicity McLean is a writer and a journalist. As a ghostwriter, she has collaborated with celebrities, sports stars and business leaders, and, Body Lengths, a book co-written with Olympian Liesel Jones about Liesel’s life in and out of the pool, won Apple iBooks 2015 Best Biography of the Year and a Reader’s Choice’ ABIA. The Van Apfel Girls are Gone is her first novel and has been published in Australia, NZ, USA, UK, France and Spain.
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.
Tania Meyer is a producer, educator and science communicator with a passion for discussing ethical issues. Her time is spent, interviewing great minds, producing digital content and reading popular science, biographies and philosophy. She loves nothing more than a robust discussion, preferably on a white sandy beach.
George Megalogenis is an award-winning author and journalist with three decades' experience in the media. His most recent book is The Football Solution, a paean to his beloved Richmond Football Club.
Louise Milligan is an investigative reporter for the ABC TV’s Four Corners. Her award-winning stories for ABC’s 7.30 on the abuse allegations against George Pell led to the book Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Cardinal Pell, which was awarded the Walkley Book Award in 2017 and won the 2018 Civic Choice Award for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Milligan is Irish-born and was raised a devoted Catholic.
Azadeh Moaveni is the author of Lipstick Jihad, the co-author, with Nobel Peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening and, most recently, Guest House for Young Widows: Women and ISIS. Since 1999, she has reported widely from Iran on youth culture, women’s rights, and Islamic reform for Time, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, and The Los Angeles Times. She is currently a senior gender analyst for the International Crisis Group.
Dr Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Geonpul woman from Quandamooka (Moreton Bay, Queensland). She is Convenor in Indigenous Studies at the School of Humanities, Griffith University. Her writing has been published in Australian and international anthologies and journals and her book, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman (2000), was the first analysis of Australian feminism from an Indigenous perspective. It remains a classic text and a key Australian contribution to the global debate on gender and race.
H. M. Naqvi is the acclaimed author of Home Boy, which won the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Naqvi has worked in the financial services industry, taught creative writing at Boston University, run a spoken word venue, and appeared on CNN, National Public Radio, and Bloomberg TV. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Lahore Institute of Management Sciences. The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack is his second book.
Claire Nichols is the host of The Book Show on ABC RN. She has spent a decade at the ABC, with roles in news, current affairs, local radio and at RN.
Justine Nolan is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales. She specialises in business and human rights and supply chain regulation.
Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria, and currently lives in the US, where he is Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His debut novel, The Fishermen, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won many awards including the FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction and the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction. His most recent book, An Orchestra of Minorities was also shortlisted for the Booker in 2019.
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.
David Penberthy co-hosts the Breakfast Show on 5AA and has been a columnist with News Limited for 20 years. He has edited The Daily Telegraph, Adelaide’s Sunday Mail and news.com.au. As state political editor for The Daily Telegraph, he covered the NSW Carr Labor Government from 1999-2004.
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.
Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University. He has published in English, Russian and Ukrainian as well as having taught in Canada, Ukraine and the USA. His bestselling book Chernobyl: the History of a Tragedy won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2018. His latest book, Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: An Untold Story of World War II was published in October 2019.
Kavita Puri works in BBC Current Affairs and is an award-winning TV executive producer and radio broadcaster. Her landmark three-part series Partition Voices for BBC Radio 4 won the Royal Historical Society's Radio and Podcast Award and its overall Public History Prize, and her critically acclaimed book of the same name was published in 2019. Kavita worked for many years at Newsnight and studied Law at Cambridge University.
Alice Pung is an award-winning author whose books include Unpolished Gem, Her Father's Daughter and Close to Home. She edited the anthologies Growing up Asian in Australia and My First Lesson, and is currently the writer in residence at Janet Clarke Hall at the University of Melbourne.
Victoria Purman is a bestselling Australian author whose most recent novel, The Land Girls, was published in 2019.
John Quiggin is a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Fellow in Economics at the University of Queensland. He is a prominent research economist and commentator on Australian and international economic policy. He has produced over 2000 publications, including seven books and over 250 refereed journal articles, in fields including decision theory, environmental economics and industrial organisation. His latest book is Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work and Why They Can Fail So Badly.
Nicola Redhouse is the Melbourne-based author of Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind. Her writing, which often focuses on the nexus between science and human experience, is published in The Monthly, The Age, The Australian, and in literary journals and anthologies including Meanjin and Best Australian Stories.
Caroline Reid is an award-winning writer who found her feet in the theatre, so her poetry is steeped in the oral tradition. In 2016 she read her first poem in public. Two years later she qualified as one of the Top 5 poets in the Australian Poetry Slam.
Sally Rippin has published over seventy books, many of them award-winning, including the highly acclaimed Polly and Buster trilogy and the popular Billie B Brown and Hey Jack! books. She is Australia’s highest selling female author and her books have sold more than 4.5 million copies in 14 languages.
Archie Roach’s iconic song, Took the Children Away, won an International Human Rights Achievement Award and his first album, Charcoal Lane, featured in US Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 50 in 1992, going gold in Australia and winning two ARIA awards. Archie’s hugely successful recording history includes 12 albums, soundtracks, film and theatrical scores, with his music a consistent presence in the ARIA charts and among the list of ARIA award winners.
Alice Robinson has been published widely in literary journals and her debut novel, Anchor Point, was longlisted for The Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards (debut fiction) in 2016. Her new novel, The Glad Shout, won the Readings Prize for New Fiction in 2019.
Before becoming a novelist, Michael Robotham was an investigative journalist working in the US, Australia and Britain. His 2004 debut thriller, The Suspect, sold more than one million copies around the world. In 2015 he won the UK's prestigious Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award for his thriller Life or Death. His most recent book is Good Girl, Bad Girl. He lives in Sydney.
Peter Rose is the author of six collections of poetry and the family memoir Rose Boys. He is Editor of Australian Book Review.
Rick Sarre is an Adjunct Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at the University of South Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology and a previous Chair of the Academic Board of UniSA and member of the University Council.
Angela Savage is an award-winning Melbourne writer, who has lived and travelled extensively in Asia. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and currently works as Director of Writers Victoria.
Clare Sawyer is a producer and programmer with a focus on youth programming. From 2016-18 she was Sydney Writers Festival's Head of Children and YA programs. She has also produced five internationally award-winning films. Currently, Clare is producing a hybrid documentary on virtuoso musician Genevieve Lacey and of course, the youth programming for Adelaide Writers' Week.
Tory Shepherd is a senior columnist and State Editor at The Advertiser. Her first book, On Freedom, was published last June.
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.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning journalist and the author of thirteen books. She won the 2015 Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism and has been honoured with several Quill Awards for journalistic excellence. Her latest book is a biography of Penny Wong, Penny Wong: Passion and Principle.
David Sly is a writer, author and editor with a career spanning over forty years.
Robert Elliott Smith is the author of Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All. He has worked in artificial intelligence for 30 years, helping create software systems that learn fighter jet manoeuvres, describe immune systems, reveal emotion in financial markets, and suggest how social networks propagate political polarisation. He is the CTO of BOXARR Ltd. and a faculty member at University College London.
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor, and broadcaster. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and contributes regularly to many other Australian and international publications. He is the author of a number of books, including Money Shot: a Journey into Porn and Censorship; Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right and his most recent book, Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre.
David Stavanger is a poet, performer, cultural producer, editor and lapsed psychologist. His poetry collection The Special won several awards and he is the co-editor of SOLID AIR: Collected Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word. His new collection is Case Notes. David is sometimes known as Green Room-nominated spoken weird artist Ghostboy. These days he lives between the stage and the page.
Adam Suckling is the CEO of the Copyright Agency. His previous roles include the Director of Policy, Corporate Affairs & Community Relation of News Corp and Director of Policy and Corporate Affairs at FOXTEL.
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.
Jamie Susskind is a writer, speaker, and practising barrister whose work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Wired, New Statesman, and The Jewish Chronicle. He is the author of the award-winning bestseller Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, an Evening Standard and Prospect Book of the Year, and a Guardian Book of the Day. Future Politics was awarded the 2019 Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize.
Miriam Sved is a Melbourne-based writer whose debut novel, Game Day, was published in 2014. She has been a contributing editor to the feminist anthologies Mothers and Others, Just Between Us, and #MeToo: Stories from the Australian movement, and her novella All the Things I Should've Given was a winner of Griffith Review's 2018 Novella Project. A Universe of Sufficient Size is her second novel.
Debra Swann is a Social Worker, working with various of people with disabilities. She has a passion for support people who experience domestic violence and sharing their stories through sign language.
Anne-Marie Te Whiu (Annie) is the Co-Editor of Solid Air: Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word. Born in Brisbane, she is of Māori and Scottish, English & Irish descent, her tribal affiliations are Ngāpuhi and Te Rarawa. She has directed several festivals, most recently as Co-Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival from 2015-17. She is an emerging poet and weaver.
Anne Tiernan is Dean of Engagement for the Griffith Business School, Griffith University, and chair of the Queensland Independent Remuneration Tribunal. Her books include Lessons in Governing: A Profile of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff and The Gatekeepers: Lessons from Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff, both with RAW Rhodes (Melbourne University Press, 2014); Learning to be a Minister: Heroic Expectations, Practical Realities, with Patrick Weller (Melbourne University Press, 2010); and Power Without Responsibility: Ministerial Staffers in Australian Governments from Whitlam to Howard (UNSW Press, 2007).
Christos Tsiolkas is the author of five novels, including Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head-On, Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award, The Slap, which won awards including Overall Best Book in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009, the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal, the Australian Booksellers Association and Australian Book Industry Awards Books of the Year, and, most recently, Damascus. He is also a playwright, essayist and screen writer.
Lucy Treloar is the author of the novel Salt Creek (2015), which won the Indie Award for Best Debut, the ABIA Matt Richell Award and the Dobbie Award, and was shortlisted for prizes including the Miles Franklin Award and the UK's Walter Scott Prize. Lucy's second novel Wolfe Island was published in 2019. She lives in inner Melbourne with her family.
Virginia Trioli is a journalist, broadcaster and author. She is a two-time Walkley Award-winner and in 2019 she replaced Jon Faine as the host of the Morning program on ABC Radio Melbourne. She lives in Melbourne with her husband and son.
Yanis Varoufakis is an economist and co-founder of the DiEM25 movement for democracy, which he was re-elected to the Greek parliament to represent in 2019. A former Finance Minister of Greece, he is the author of a memoir, Adults in the Room, and a history, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, which reveal and explain the catastrophic mishandling of Europe since the financial crisis. Both were number one bestsellers. His latest bestseller is Talking To My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism.
wāni is a trans-disciplinary artist of Indigenous Ba Shi heritage. He is the founder of Sapologie the showcase, winner of the 2019 Wyndham Art Prize as well as the current Australian Poetry Slam Champion. wāni is also a Greenroom award winner for his experimental theatre work Tales of an Afronaut.
Donna Ward is the publisher at Inkerman & Blunt. She founded indigo, the journal of Western Australian creative writing and her prose can be found in respected journals and anthologies nationally, internationally and online. She has past lives as a psychotherapist and as a social worker and has previously worked in her own private practice, in welfare management and social policy development. She, I Dare Not Name: A Spinster's Meditations on Life, is Donna's first book.
Mandy Whyte is a New Zealander who has worked for thirty years advising and managing aid and development programmes in the Pacific and Indonesia, and currently in the Solomon Islands. Dancing on a Razor’s Edge is her first book.
Michael Williams is the Director of the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne.
Tara June Winch is a Wiradjuri author, born in Australia and based in France. Her first novel, Swallow the Air, was critically acclaimed and won numerous literary awards. In 2008, Tara was mentored by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her second book, the story collection After the Carnage, was shortlisted for the 2017 NSW Premier’s and the Queensland Literary Awards for Fiction. Her second novel, The Yield, was published in 2019.
Deb Whitmont is an award winning journalist, author and former Middle East correspondent for the ABC. She is a two–time Walkley Award winner for her work with ABCs Four Corners and is a three-time winner of the Human Rights Commission award for TV.
Charlotte Wood is the author of six novels and two books of non-fiction. Her bestselling novel, The Natural Way of Things, won the 2016 Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year and Indie Book Award for Fiction, was joint winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, and was published throughout Europe, the United Kingdom and North America. She has been twice shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, as well as many others for this and previous works. Her latest novel is The Weekend.
Danielle Wood is the budget policy and institutional reform program director at Grattan Institute. She has extensive experience advising on economic policy issues. She is the president of the Economic Society of Australia and Chair of the Women in Economics Network.
Angela Woollacott is the Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University and an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Professor Clare Wright is an award-winning historian and author. Her book, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, won the 2014 Stella Prize and her most recent book is You Daughters of Freedom, about the Australian suffragette movement.
Tom Wright is a theatre writer, best known for his adaptations and translations, and is the host of the Adelaide Festival’s Breakfast with Papers.
Manal Younus is an Australian based freelance storyteller from Eritrea who believes that language and stories are the very fabric of our existence. Using her writing and performance, Manal explores different aspects of life from perseverance, identity, travel and truth.
Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in Far North Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World is his first book.
Nevo Zisin is a Jewish, queer, non-binary writer, activist and public speaker with a particular focus on issues surrounding gender, sex, culture and sexuality. They run workshops in schools and workplaces around trans issues. They are the author of the award-winning Finding Nevo, a memoir on gender transition.
