FEATURED authors
KATE MILDENHALL
Kate Mildenhall is a writer who lives on the outskirts of Melbourne with her family. Her debut novel, Skylarking, was published in Australia by Black Inc. in 2016 and in the UK by Legend Press in 2017. Skylarking was longlisted for the Voss Literary Prize 2017 and the Indie Book Awards 2017. Kate has received residencies at Varuna, the Writers House and at Bundanon. With friend and author Katherine Collette, Kate co-hosts The First Time podcast, a podcast about the first time you publish a book.
Kate’s second novel, The Mother Fault, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2020 and Harper Collins in the UK in May 2021.
The Hummingbird Effect, Kate’s third novel, was published in Australia 2023.
You can read more from Kate at her newsletter, ‘The Bowerbird’.
MARK SMITH
Mark Smith is the author of adult fiction novel Three Boys Gone and four young adult novels, including his critically acclaimed Winter Trilogy. The Road to Winter was shortlisted for multiple awards and is taught in schools around Australia. The sequel, Wilder Country won the 2018 Australian Indie Book Award for YA.
An award-winning writer of short fiction, Mark’s work has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Review of Australian Fiction, The Big Issue, The Victorian Writer, Island and The Australian.
Mark is also an in-demand speaker at schools and an experienced facilitator at festivals and book launches.
BRUCE PASCOE AND LYN HARWOOD
Bruce Pascoe has published widely in both adult and young adult literature. In 2018 Bruce was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He has worked as a teacher, farmer, fisherman, barman, fencing contractor, lecturer, Aboriginal language researcher, archaeological site worker and editor. Bruce is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man, and currently lives on his farm in Gippsland, Victoria.
Lyn has worked as a teacher, a dancer, an editor, a publisher and an artist. She is a director on the Board of Black Duck Foods, promoting Indigenous food agriculture. Lyn has instigated a community based fuel management practice for the Mallacoota township. She feels that the country has much to teach us about proper care.
TRACEY SPICER
Tracey Spicer AM is a multiple Walkley Award winning author, journalist and broadcaster who has anchored national programs for ABC TV and radio, Network Ten and Sky News.
The inaugural national convenor of Women in Media, Tracey is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers and emcees in Australia. In 2019 she was named the NSW Premier’s Woman of the Year, accepted the Sydney Peace Prize alongside Tarana Burke for the Me Too movement, and won the national award for Excellence in Women’s Leadership through Women & Leadership Australia.
In 2018, Tracey was chosen as one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence, winning the Social Enterprise and Not-For-Profit category. For her 30 years of media and charity work, Tracey has been awarded the Order of Australia.
Highlights of her outstanding career include writing, producing and presenting documentaries on women and girls in Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Papua New Guinea and India. She is an Ambassador for Your Side, ActionAid, the Ethnic Business Awards, Emerge Australia, the Australian POTS Foundation and Purple Our World, and Patron of the Pancreatic Cancer Alliance.
Tracey’s essays have appeared in dozens of books including Women of Letters, She’s Having a Laugh, Father Figures, Unbreakable, and Bewitched & Bedevilled: Women Write the Gillard Years.
JOCK SERONG
Jock Serong grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne, and like a poorly-tied dinghy, he’s been drifting away ever since.
As a student and young lawyer he volunteered with the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service on the Bringing Them Home inquiry, and did a stint in the Western Desert building a native title claim with the Martu people.
He drove a ‘73 HQ panel van around the country, spent some time sorting frozen prawns in Carnarvon and changed lightbulbs in Darwin Casino for seven bucks an hour. He fetched up on Victoria’s west coast in the mid-nineties, then left again and became a criminal barrister. He worked with asylum seekers back when detention centres were onshore.
And he never wrote a word of it.
As Senior Grump in a young family he moved back to the coast, and something about the kelp and the storms and the long nights kicked him into gear: writing for Surfing World and other publications, he began trying to tell stories that weren’t sports-writing so much as people and place-writing. Environments, First Australians, mental health, forgotten histories, the tiny miracles of life on a reef. As surfing itself expanded beyond 20th century stereotypes, Jock's writing kept pushing into new corners of the experience.
He divides his time between Port Fairy in western Victoria and Flinders Island in Bass Strait’s Furneaux Island group.
RACHEL MORTON
Rachel Morton is a writer living on Eastern Maar Country in south-west Victoria. Her poetry has appeared in Meanjin Quarterly, The Moth Magazine and various other publications. Rachel was shortlisted for the 2019 Australian Catholic University Prize for Poetry. The Sun Was Electric Light is her first novel and won the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
The Sun Was Electric Light: a beautifully told story about a disillusioned woman searching for love and belonging from the winner of the 2024 VPLA Unpublished Manuscript Award. Perfect for fans of Deborah Levy and Miranda July, The Sun Was Electric Light explores what it means to live a good life.
MAGGIE MACKELLAR
In her latest book, Graft, Maggie MacKellar describes a year on a Merino wool farm on the east coast of Tasmania, and all of life - and death - that surrounds her through the cycle of lambing seasons. She gives us the land she knows and loves, the lambs she cares for, the ewes she tries to save, the birds around her, and the dogs and horses she adores.
She has published two books on the history of settlement in Australia and Canada and two memoirs, When It Rains and How To Get There.
She now lives on the east coast of Tasmania with her partner and two children.
LIA HILLS
Lia Hills is an award-winning poet, novelist and translator, born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has been published, translated and performed around the world.
In 2019, Lia received a Creative Victoria Creators Fund grant to work on her critically-acclaimed novel, The Desert Knows Her Name (Affirm Press, 2024). Set in the Wimmera, it is the story of a young girl who walks barefoot out of the desert, and the response to her emergence in the local community and beyond. The novel explores the erasure and re-emergence of voices, both human and nonhuman, and the silences that persist in contemporary Australia. The first draft was narrated, using voice-recognition software, over a two-week period in an abandoned farmhouse on the edge of the desert. During the writing of The Desert Knows Her Name, Lia engaged regularly with the Barengi Gadgin Land Council, the representative body of the traditional custodians of the Country on which the novel is set.
Lia lives with her family in the hills outside Naarm/Melbourne on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people.
