Authors attending the Manly Writers’ Festival
Ingrid J. Adams is the author of the ‘Descended’ series, an epic young adult love story steeped in fantasy. It took her a long time to realise her crazy dream of being a writer, but between then and now she has earned degrees in business tourism, journalism, kinesiology and nutrition, studied psychotherapy, and worked in media and as a therapist. She lives in Manly with her husband, four sons, and her cuddle-hunting cavoodle. She enjoys travel, yoga, meditation, farmers markets, cooking (and eating), ocean-swimming, and escaping into fictional worlds of her own and others’ creations.
Tim Ayliffe’s ‘real-world’ thriller novels have been informed by his 25-year career as a journalist in Australia and around the world. He writes about espionage, extremism, politics and the global power games at play in the 21st Century. He has been the Managing Editor of Television and Video for ABC News and also Executive Producer of News Breakfast. He is the author of the ‘John Bailey’ series including ‘The Greater Good, State of Fear’ (2022), ‘The Enemy Within’ and his most recent novel, ‘Killer Traitor Spy’ (2023). His thrillers are also in development for TV. When he is not writing or chasing news stories, he watches rugby and surfs. He lives in Sydney.
Andy Bernal is a former Socceroo who grew up in Canberra, the son of Spanish migrants, who became one of the pioneers for Australian football players abroad as a professional in both Spain and England. He was an integral part of one of the greatest teams in the history of Reading FC and is considered by many supporters as one of the club’s best talents. After his retirement as a player, he became a football agent and was entrusted to be manager in Spain to superstar David Beckham following his move to Real Madrid from Manchester United. His autobiography ‘Riding Shotgun’ was published in 2021; his latest book, ‘The Vibe Manager’, tells the inside story of the 2023 A-League champions, Central Coast Mariners. He lives on the Central Coast of NSW where he is the Athletic Director for the Central Coast Mariners Football Club.
Edward Acton Cavanough is a journalist, researcher and policy analyst based in Adelaide. He has reported from Afghanistan, China, Mongolia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Timor Leste, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. His writing has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, The Nation, The South China Morning Post and The Australian. He is CEO of the McKell Institute. He is the author of ‘Divided Isles: Solomon Islands and the China Switch’ (2023).
Kim Cornish is a Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor and Director of the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at Monash University. She previously worked at McGill University (Montreal) as the Canada Research Chair in developmental neuroscience. Originally from the UK, she has spent the past 30 years tracing the developmental pathways of young children with vulnerable brains — including children with autism, Fragile X syndrome and Down syndrome — as well as children who are neurotypical. Most recently, she has focused on the translation of this new knowledge into community-based digital programs, co-designed with educators and families, to help strengthen early cognitive functioning. In ‘The Post-Pandemic Child’ (2023), she takes us through the key challenges now faced by the ‘pandemic generation’.
Fiona Crawford (Fred) is a writer, editor, and researcher whose work spans social and environmental issues, the arts, and football. Fiona is the co-author of ‘Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women’s Football’ (2019) and the author of ‘The Matilda Effect’ (2023). She has written for such publications and organisations as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Big Issue, Peppermint, Kill Your Darlings, the Matildas and the W-League, FourFourTwo, The Conversation, Vogue, and the Homeless World Cup. She is also an adjunct lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology’s Centre for Justice.
Miranda Darling is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. She has published two thrillers, a novel, and a non-fiction work on the Empress of Iran. She read English and Modern Languages at Oxford then took on a master’s degree in strategic studies and defence from the Australian National University. She became an adjunct scholar at a public policy think tank specialising in non-traditional security threats. She regularly performs spoken word poetry and writes essays for RUSSH magazine. Ex-model, mamma, short-order cook, divemaster, fencer, nomad…like every woman, she wears many hats. Her novel ‘Thunderhead’ (2024) is a black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free.
Cocoa Deep-Amek is a poet and hip-hop artist from Sydney, of Ghanaian and Lebanese heritage. He uses poetry as a creative outlet to express his experience and utilises his words and music to combat racism. He has been writing and producing music since 2018, with his debut album ‘The Age of Aquarius’ released in 2021.
Liz Deep-Jones is an author, journalist, producer, presenter, filmmaker, curator and the inaugural Freilich Arts/Media and Activism Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU). Her best-selling young adult novels, ‘Lucy Zeezou’s Goal’ and ‘Lucy Zeezou’s Glamour Game’ were re-released in 2023 for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. She is a champion for human rights, inspiring young people to act through her mentoring role at the ANU in media and arts activism. She is travelling across Australia with her ‘We Bleed The Same’ anti-racism exhibition and documentary. She’s also writing her third novel, hoping to inspire young readers to never give up on their dreams. She is one of the first female television journalists to break the mould in sports reporting having covered numerous national and international sporting events, including the FIFA World Cup.
Greg Downes is a lecturer with Southern Cross University who became aware of the many injustices and discriminations faced by young girls and women in their pursuit of playing football (soccer) when his daughter was a junior player. When studying for his master’s degree and later PhD, he also came to realise that little or no research had been done on the history of women’s football in Australia. The voices of the women were unheard and were yet to be written into the history of the game. He has written two books to help address that gap in history: ‘Dedicated Lives — Stories of Pioneers of Women’s Football in Australia’ (2021) and ‘The First Matildas — the 1975 Asian Ladies Championship’ (2023).
Ursula Dubosarsky wanted to be a writer from the age of six and is now the author of almost 70 books for children and young adults, which have won several national prizes, including the NSW, Victorian, South Australian and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. She has also been nominated several times for the prestigious international children’s literature prizes, the Astrid Lindgren Award and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. She has a PhD from Macquarie University in English Literature. She was Australian Children’s Laureate for 2020-21. She lives in Sydney with her family.
Mark Edele is Hansen Professor in History and Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of six books on the history of the Soviet Union, including ‘Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II’ (2021), and most recently ‘Russia’s War Against Ukraine’ (2023). He has worked in archives in Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany and the United States. He teaches the histories of the Soviet Union, of World War II, and of dictatorship and democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Gavin Fang is Editorial Director of the ABC and is one of Australia’s most experienced news executives, with 25 years in print and broadcast journalism. Before joining the ABC in Perth in 2000, he worked with The West Australian newspaper. A former ABC foreign correspondent in Indonesia, he led the ABC’s news teams during the pandemic as Deputy Director of ABC News and led diversity and inclusion initiatives within ABC News. He is the co-author with Tracey Kirkland of ‘Pandemedia’, which examines the impact of COVID-19 on the media and news-telling.
Paul Farrell is an investigative reporter at the ABC’s flagship current affairs program 7.30. He previously worked at The Guardian and Buzzfeed News, breaking major national and international stories. He led The Guardian’s Nauru files reporting team, which published thousands of pages of leaked documents from Australia’s offshore detention regime and won multiple journalism awards. He has worked on global investigations led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, including the Panama Papers and the HSBC tax files. He has reported extensively on the way politicians wield public funds for political purposes, and his award-winning reporting on Gladys Berejiklian formed a key line of inquiry for the corruption probe into the former premier. He has also extensively covered the intersection of tech and government, such as the Australian government’s Robodebt program. ‘In Gladys: A Leader’s Undoing’ (2023), Paul takes us behind the scenes of the investigation that prompted Berejiklian’s resignation.
Luke Fischer is a poet and philosopher. His books include the poetry collections ‘A Gamble for my Daughter’ (2022), ‘A Personal History of Vision’ (2017) and ‘Paths of Flight’ (2013), the monograph ‘The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the ‘New Poems” (2015), and the co-edited volumes ‘Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives’ (2019) and ‘The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives’ (2021). He guest edited (with Dalia Nassar) a special section of the ‘Goethe Yearbook’ (2015) on ‘Goethe and Environmentalism’. He is also the author of the children’s book ‘The Blue Forest’ (2015). Fischer holds a PhD from the University of Sydney where he is also an honorary associate of the philosophy department.
Carla Fitzgerald is a writer and a recovered lawyer from Sydney. She studied English literature and law at university, and has worked in a range of jobs, including at the Australian Human Rights Commission. Her debut middle-grade novel, ‘How to be Prime Minister and Survive Grade Five’ and her debut picture book, ‘Keeping Up with the Dachshunds’ were published in 2022. She currently works as a tutor at the Australian Writers Centre and is a Books in Home role model. Her favourite things to do are write, walk, eat and hang out with her family. Not necessarily in that order.
Michelle Ford-Eriksson MBE won Olympic gold and bronze in swimming at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, and was a dual world record holder. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California with a master’s degree in Sports Psychology and a bachelor’s degree in business communication. She has held directorships of the Australian Sports Commission, Australian Sports Foundation, and Swimming Australia. She was Australia’s only foundation member of the IOC Athletes Commission, where she sat alongside the current IOC President, Thomas Bach, and Lord Sebastian Coe, President of World Athletics. Originally from Sydney, she lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her autobiography ‘Turning the Tide’ (2024) is written with Craig Lord.
Craig Foster AM is a former professional football player in Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong and England, Socceroo, as well as human rights campaigner. He currently is an analyst with STAN Sport’s Champions League coverage and previously worked as the chief football analyst with SBS for 18 years with whom he covered the World Cup Finals in Germany, South Africa, Brazil, and Russia. Craig is also a lawyer, Co-Chair of the Australian Republican Movement, 2023 NSW Australian of the Year,
member of the Australian Multicultural Council, a Human Rights Ambassador with Amnesty International, and an Adjunct Professor of Sport and Social Responsibility with Torrens University. He is author of the books ‘Fozz on Football’ (2010) and ‘Saving Hakeem’ (2019).
Catherine Fox AM is a journalist, author, and presenter and one of Australia’s leading experts on leadership, diversity, the future of workplaces, and the status of women. She began her career working in financial services before joining the Australian Financial Review. Her career has included reporting on workplace trends, writing a weekly column ‘Corporate Woman’ and interviewing management gurus, Nobel Prize winners and international CEOs. She has written or co-written five books, including ‘Stop Fixing Women’ which won a Walkley Award, and ‘Women Kind’ with Kirstin Ferguson. She regularly presents at conferences and appears in the media around Australia and internationally. Her next book on tackling the sexism and bias keeping women out of leadership will be published later in 2024.
Hunter Fujak is a Lecturer in Sports Management at Deakin University in Melbourne. His PhD explored sports consumer behaviour, specifically in understanding consumption patterns within Australia’s crowded sports marketplace. He has previously worked in sports consultancy as an audience and sponsorship analyst for Australasia’s largest sporting leagues and events, including the Australian Open Tennis, Rugby World Cup and National Rugby League. Hunter has published extensively across sports broadcasting, consumer behaviour and sports culture, and is a regular media contributor to topics pertaining to the business of Australian football. He is the author of ‘Code War$ — the battle for fans, dollars, and survival’ (2021).
Lisa Gallate is a senior commercial litigator specialising in class actions and corporate insolvency with a master’s degree in law from Cambridge University. She is also a member of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement, a member and voluntary grief support worker for the National Association for Loss and Grief, a registered counsellor with the Australian Counselling Association, and has contributed to Diversity Council Australia podcasts about grief support in the workplace. Her memoir ‘Just Because — Love, Loss, Renewal’ (2023) explores the issue of grief and gives practical tips on how to navigate a way through it. She grew up in New Zealand and now lives in Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
Michael Gawenda is one of Australia’s best-known journalists and authors. In a career spanning four decades, he was a political reporter, a foreign correspondent based in London and in Washington, a columnist, a feature writer, and a senior editor at Time Magazine. He was editor and editor-in-chief of The Age from 1997 to 2004. Michael has won numerous journalism awards, including three Walkley awards. He was the inaugural director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne and is the author of four books. His most recent is ‘My Life as a Jew’ (2023).
Genevieve Gannon is an author and award-winning journalist based in Sydney. Over her 15-year career she has worked as a front-line reporter in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney covering crime, health, social affairs and politics. She was the lead court reporter for Australian Associated Press and has been published in most major Australian newspapers. She is presently the senior journalist at The Australian Women’s Weekly where she is known for in-depth articles on issues relating to the health, rights and safety of women. She was named Journalist of the Year at the 2019 Mumbrella Publish awards. Her first novel ‘Husband Hunters’ was published in 2014. She followed this with ‘Chasing Chris Campbell’ (2015), ‘The First Year’ (2017) and ‘The Mothers’ (2019), which was based on real-life cases of embryo mix-ups in IVF labs. Her most recent novel is ‘The Gifted Son’ (2023).
Lucas Gillard from Melbourne works principally in marketing, but is also a writer, playwright, and poet. His comedy ‘Love In the Time of Milkbars’ was warmly received in the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2009, and he was placed on the podium for Best Play in the 2010 Short and Sweet Festival. He has co-written ‘Be My Guest’ (2021) and was lead author of ‘George Best in Australia’ (2024), both with Jason Goldsmith.
Jason Goldsmith lives in the inner north of Melbourne. A father of two, he is heavily involved in community sport and a big fan of Australian footballers and the national teams. He loves nothing more than watching the progress of the Socceroos and Matildas at World and Asian Cups. He has written two books of his own: ‘Green and Golden Boots’ (2023) and ‘Surfing for England’ (2019), co-written ‘Be My Guest’ (2021) and collaborated with Lucas Gillard on ‘George Best in Australia’ (2024).
Robert Gott has published many books for children, and is also the creator of the newspaper cartoon The Adventures of Naked Man, which ran in The Age newspaper for 20 years. He is the author of the William Power series of crime-caper novels set in 1940s Australia, comprising ‘Good Murder, A Thing of Blood, Amongst the Dead’, and ‘The Serpent’s Sting’, and of the Murders series, comprising ‘The Holiday Murders’, ‘The Port Fairy Murders’, ‘The Autumn Murders’, and ‘The Orchard Murders’. His most recent book is a political comedy, ‘Naked Ambition’.
Tracy Hall is an author, keynote speaker and senior marketing executive with extensive experience with start-ups, large corporations and global tech brands in Australia and the US. In 2019, she made a name for herself as Hamish McLaren’s famous ‘last victim’ thanks to her role in The Australian’s podcast, ‘Who the Hell is Hamish?’ She writes and speaks publicly about intimate fraud, romance scams, white-collar crime, victim mindsets, resilience and humanity’s need to rethink how we trust. By sharing her personal stories about falling prey to one of the world’s most infamous con men and having to take a crash course in resilience after losing her father to leukemia and watching her mum battle breast cancer, she is living her mission of embracing and normalising vulnerability while helping others heed the warning signs of intimate and financial betrayal. ‘The Last Victim’ (2024) is her first book written with Summer Land. She lives in Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
Andrew Howe grew up in Sydney where his first sporting passion was for the Cronulla Sharks rugby league team and his academic ability was for statistics and history. He attended his first national soccer league game in 1988 and fell in love with the round ball code then and there. An inquisitive mind led to him searching for more information about the history of soccer in Australia and, not satisfied with what he found, he set about developing his own record of the sport. His sporting statistics career then developed alongside his professional career as a population demographer with the Australian Bureau of Statistics in Adelaide. He has been the official honorary statistician for Football Australia since 1999; and is author of the ‘Encyclopedia of Socceroos’ (2018, 2022) and the lead co-author of the ‘Encyclopedia of Matildas’ (2019, 2023).
Amy Hutton is an award-winning television producer and writer of romantic comedies who grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. When not plotting delicious romantic trials for her characters, she is an enthusiastic traveller, an animal advocate, a Disneyland aficionado, and mum to a rescue dog named Buffy. Her debut novel ‘Sit, Stay, Love’ was released in 2023. Her second novel, ‘Love from Scratch’, will be released June 2024.
Zeina Issa is a Sydney-based Australian-Lebanese poet, translator and published columnist. Her work has appeared in ‘Australian Poetry’, ‘Mascara’, ‘Red Room Poetry’ and ‘Contrapasso’, and has also been anthologised. As the founder of the MACAM Group, she has supported locally based Arab musicians and singers through staging numerous concerts and musical events. She is also the creator and editor of ‘Poem and Dish’, a space where Australian poetry and her other passion — Eastern Mediterranean food — are celebrated.
Kirsty Jagger is a journalist by trade. In 2019, Kirsty won the inaugural Heyman Mentorship Award, established by acclaimed Australian author Kathryn Heyman for a writer from a background of social or economic disadvantage. Her debut novel ‘Roseghetto’ (2023) takes some inspiration from growing up in the housing commission estates of Sydney’s western suburbs.
Thomas Keneally AO is an Australian living treasure who has written novels, non-fiction, essays and plays in a writing career spanning 60 years. He has won multiple awards including the prestigious Booker Prize for ‘Schindler’s Ark’ in 1982 and is a four-time winner of the Miles Franklin Award. His most recent works include a novel, ‘Fanatic Hart’, and a memoir titled ‘A Bloody Good Rant: My Passions, Memories and Demons’, both published in 2022. He is the founding Chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, a passionate support of the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles, and lives in Manly.
Tracey Kirkland has spent more than 30 years as a journalist writing for broadcast and print. During COVID, she was the ABC’s national news-gathering editor and is now the continuous news editor for ABC News Channel. She is the co-author with Gavin Fang of ‘Pandemedia’, which examines the impact of COVID-19 on the media and news-telling.
Maggie Kirkman is a psychologist and a Senior Research Fellow in Global and Women’s Health at Monash University. Before gaining a PhD at age 50, Maggie taught kindergarten children, children with hearing impairments and children with profound disabilities. Her research includes women’s experiences of infertility, abortion, donor-assisted conception, breast cancer and ageing well. She is the co-author of ‘My Sister’s Child’ and the co-editor of ‘Sperm Wars’. She appears regularly in the media, including on ABC Radio and in ‘The Conversation’. In 2019, Maggie was recognised as an inaugural Champion for Women by Women’s Health Victoria. Maggie’s most recent book, ‘Time of Our Lives: Celebrating Older Women’ (2023) presents the extraordinary lives of twenty ordinary women in their 70s, 80s, and 90s challenging the stereotype of ‘helpless old women’.
Will Kostakis is an award-winning author for young adults. He has been at it for 15 years, but his mum insists it is just a phase and any day now, he will pursue a real career. He signed his first book deal in high school. ‘Loathing Lola’ was released when he was just 19. His contemporary novels, ‘The First Third’ and ‘The Sidekicks’, warmed (then broke) hearts the world over. His first foray into fantasy, the ‘Monuments’ duology, saw teenagers accidentally killing gods hidden under different Aussie high schools, absorbing their powers, and wrestling with what it means to be gods. His latest novel, ‘We Could Be Something’ (2023) is a humorous yet heart-rending look at family, fame and falling in love. An advocate for young readers and writers, he was awarded the 2020 Maurice Saxby Award by the School Library Association of NSW for service to children’s and young adult literature. He is an ambassador for the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge.
Summer Land is an author, ghostwriter, copywriter, podcaster, keynote speaker and moderator. She has ghostwritten over ten books including ‘The Mindful High Performer’ (Chelsea Pottenger), ‘Acting Up’ (Lynne McGranger), ‘A Joyful Life’ (Rosemary Kariuki) and ‘Aussie Ark’ (Tim Faulkner) and collaborated with Tracy Hall on ‘The Last Victim’ (2024). Summer’s first book, ‘Summerlandish: Do as I Say, Not as I Did’, was published in 2013, which earned her a nomination for Cosmopolitan’s Fun Fearless Female Award. Her second book, ‘I Now Pronounce You Husband and Expat’ was published in 2019. Originally from the United States, she lives mostly in Mudgee and occasionally on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, bestselling author, filmmaker, and co-founder of Declassified Australia. He has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many others. His latest book is ‘The Palestine Laboratory: how Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world’, which won the 2023 Walkley Book Award. His other books include ‘Pills, Powder and Smoke’, ‘Disaster Capitalism’, and ‘My Israel Question’. His documentary films include ‘Disaster Capitalism’, and the Al Jazeera English films, ‘West Africa’s Opioid Crisis’ and ‘Under the Cover of Covid’. He was based in East Jerusalem from 2016–2020.
Craig Lord is a swimming and Olympic correspondent who has been writing for The Times and Sunday Times for more than three decades. Described by the World Swimming Coaches Association as ‘the conscience of swimming’, Craig has been at the forefront of breaking news on doping, governance scandals, and how those impact the lives of athletes, coaches, parents and communities. He is a recipient of the International Swimming Hall of Fame’s Al Schoenfield media award and the American Swimming Coaches Association media award. He has worked with Michelle Ford in the writing of her autobiography, ‘Turning the Tide’. Craig lives in Dresden, Germany.
Lucy Lever lives in the bush on Sydney’s Northern Beaches coastal fringe with her husband. Lucy makes frequent visits to family on the NSW north coast, where she found the inspiration for her first novel, ‘Mystic Ridge’, a rural rom com set in an alternative community.
Walter Marsh is a journalist based in Tarntanya/Adelaide with a background in history and culture. A former editor and staff writer at The Adelaide Review and Rip It Up, his writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, and InDaily. His 2023 biography ‘Young Rupert’ is about the making of the Murdoch empire.
John Maynard is a Worimi Aboriginal man and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle. He is a former Deputy Chairperson of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and member of the Executive Committees of the Australian Historical Association, the NSW History Council, the Indigenous Higher Education Advisory Council, the Australian Research Council College of Experts, the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network and the NSW Fulbright Selection Committee. He gained his PhD in 2003, examining the rise of early Aboriginal political activism. He has worked with and within many Aboriginal communities, urban, rural, and remote. He was awarded the Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the Australian Historical Association in 2022, and the Annual History Citation from the History Council of NSW in 2023. His publications have concentrated on the intersections of Aboriginal political and social history, and the history of Australian race relations. He is also the author of several books on Indigenous people and sport, including ‘The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe’ (2019 2nd Ed), and ‘Aborigines and the Sport of Kings’. His most recent book is a two-volume publication on ‘Socceroos — A World Cup Odyssey, 1965 to 2022’ (2023).
Sarah McKay is a neuroscientist, author, speaker and director of Think Brain’s suite of online professional training programs in brain health and applied neuroscience with a PhD in Neuroscience from Oxford University. Sarah’s first book, ‘The Women’s Brain Book: The neuroscience of health, hormones and happiness’ was published in 2018. Her second book, ‘Baby Brain: The surprising neuroscience of how pregnancy and motherhood sculpt our brains and change our minds (for the better)’ was published in 2023. She coaches therapists, teachers and other helping professionals on how to thoughtfully apply insights and tools from neuroscience to their work. She lives on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
Nick McKenzie is a 16-time winner of the Walkley Award, Australia’s highest journalism honour, and four-time Australian Journalist of the Year. He is a leading Australian investigative journalist who works for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He has also presented major investigations for the ABC’s Four Corners and 7:30, 60 Minutes and the Australian Financial Review. His investigations span foreign affairs, defence and national security, corporate wrongdoing, politics, organised crime and corruption, the criminal justice system and social affairs. His work has sparked many international, national and state inquires, including Royal Commissions and parliamentary inquiries, prompted investigations in Australia, the US, Britain and Switzerland into corruption that have led to significant change. He has led groundbreaking investigations into political corruption that have led to the resignation of state and federal MPs and has also exposed war crimes involving Australian special forces. He has conducted an unprecedented infiltration of Australia’s neo-nazi movement, revealed a major corruption scandal within Australia’s central bank, exposed organised crime in Australia’s biggest casinos and revealed doping and corruption in elite sport. He is passionate about giving vulnerable people a voice. He works closely with whistleblowers and is an advocate for better laws to protect their critical role exposing corruption and wrongdoing. Whistleblowers have worked with him to expose corruption, abuse scandals or other failings in political parties, the defence force, the Catholic church, the health system, law enforcement agencies and sport. His book ‘Crossing the Line: The explosive inside story behind the Ben Roberts-Smith headlines’ (2023) shares the story of how a small group of brave soldiers and two determined journalists overcame a plot to suppress one of the greatest military scandals in Australian history.
Angela O’Keeffe completed a Master of Arts in Writing at UTS, and her first novel, ‘Night Blue’, was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. She was awarded the 2023 Varuna Eleanor Dark Fellowship, the 2023 Quentin Bryce award, and in the US the 2023 Joan C Bell Award for her second book, ‘The Sitter’ (2023). She lives and works in Sydney on Gadigal land.
Emily Eklund Power is a writer, media and communications professional with a passion for news and current affairs. A former journalist for News Limited, Bauer Media Group and Hearst, her work has been published in newspapers and magazines nationally and internationally. She has led Queensland Government communications and issues management in disaster recovery and managed national and international press for the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games. She currently manages communications and stakeholder relations for a large national company. ‘Shirley’s Story’ (2023) is her first book.
Mirandi Riwoe is the author of ‘Stone Sky Gold Mountain’, which won the 2020 Queensland Literary Award — Fiction Book Award and the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize and was shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize and longlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her short story collection, ‘The Burnished Sun’, includes the novella, ‘The Fish Girl’, which won Seizure Viva la Novella and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her work has appeared in ‘Best Australian Stories’, ‘Meanjin’, ‘Review of Australian Fiction’, ‘Griffith Review’ and ‘Best Summer Stories’. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies and lives in Brisbane. Her latest book is ‘Sunbirds’ (2023).
Jeanne Ryckmans has worked for more than two decades in Australian publishing. A co-founder of literary agency Key People Literary Management, she is a former senior publisher at Random House, HarperCollins and Black Inc, and Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers’ Festival (2019-2022). Prior to joining the publishing world, she worked for seven years in arts television with France 2 and SBS Television as an on-air presenter and documentary producer and was features editor at ELLE Magazine and books editor for Vogue Australia. She has worked with authors such as Christopher Koch, Bradley Trevor Greive, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Whitlam, and Vicki Laveau-Harvie. Her third book ‘Trust: A Fractured Fable’ was published in 2023.
Sara M. Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, with Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian heritage. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the groundbreaking 2019 anthology ‘Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity’. Her first novel is ‘Songs for the Dead and the Living’ (2023). Her first poetry collection is ‘The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat’ (2023). She is the first and only poet to win both the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the inaugural Affirm fellowship for Sweatshop writers, a Neilma Sidney travel grant, Varuna writers’ residency, and Amant writers’ residency in Brooklyn, New York, amongst other honours.
Michele Seminara is a poet and editor from the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Her writing has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as Cordite, Mascara Literary Review, Jacket2 Magazine and Australian Poetry Journal. She has published two full-length collections, ‘Suburban Fantasy’ (2021) and ‘Engraft’ (2016), as well as two chapbooks ‘Scar to Scar’ (written with Robbie Coburn, 2016) and ‘HUSH’ (2017). She has co-judged the Queensland Poetry Festival Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Award (2017-2019), curated the Manly Art Gallery and Museum Poetry Alive readings (2018-2021), and since 2014 has been Managing Editor and co-poetry Editor of creative arts journal Verity La (2014-2021).
Lachlan Strahan was an Australian diplomat for 30 years, serving in Germany, Korea, India (as deputy High Commissioner), Switzerland (as acting UN Permanent Representative) and Solomon Islands (as High Commissioner until January 2023). He has a PhD in History. His first book, ‘Australia’s China’, has become one of the standard works on Australia–China relations. His second, ‘Day of Reckoning’, traces a series of crimes in Papua New Guinea after World War II and was shortlisted for the 2006 NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize. His most recent book, ‘Justice in Kelly Country’ (2023), explores the life of his great-great grandfather, a cop who patrolled the colonial frontier for 32 years and pursued criminals big and small, including Ned Kelly. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Prime Minister’s Australian History Prize. Prior to joining the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, he taught Chinese and Russian politics and history at several universities in Melbourne.
Jill Valentine has spent 20 years working in communications and PR storytelling for large, global organisations who, before moving to Sydney, has worked in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Now, she is telling a different story in her debut fiction novel ‘High Heels and Low Blows’ (2024). Before corporate life, she worked in a multitude of fun jobs including singing, roller-skating waitress at Disneyland Paris, and Kristin Scott Thomas’ au-pair. She studied French and Spanish at university in London and completed a communication management master’s degree in Sydney. Born in Scotland, she moved to England when she was ten-years-old. In 2000, she arrived in Sydney with her back-pack and never left. She lives on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
James Vella-Bardon was born and raised in Malta, an island nation influenced by thousands of years of imperial history, from the Romans to the British where his passion for exciting and dramatic historical events was formed. After reading law and history at the Universities of both Malta and Sydney, James qualified as a lawyer and completed a PhD on the rights and freedoms of peoples at international law. He emigrated to Sydney in 2007 and turned his hand to novel writing. His debut novel ‘The Sheriff’s Catch’ (2018), which recounts the adventures of a Spanish Armada castaway in Tudor Ireland, made bestseller lists in Europe and was also named an ‘Outstanding Historical’ by the IAN Book Awards in 2019, while receiving various other international awards and nominations. He was heralded as ‘the new king of historical fiction’ by British newspaper The Scotsman, in their review of his novella ‘Mad King Robin’, about Robert the Bruce.
Sam Vincent has written for The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Griffith Review and The Best Australian Essays. His first book, ‘Blood and Guts’, was longlisted for the Walkley Book Award and in 2019 he won the Walkley Award for longform feature writing. He runs a cattle and fig farm in the Yass Valley, NSW, and supplies fruit to some of the best restaurants in the Canberra region. His most recent book, ‘My Father and Other Animals: How I Took on the Family Farm’ (2023) won the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize for non-fiction in 2023.
Image: Northern Beaches Advocate