Alex Skovron has been widely published as a poet with five collections appearing to date, most recently The Man and the Map (2003) and Autographs (2008), a book of prose-poems. He has won many awards including the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry (twice), the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (twice), the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize, and the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His prose novella, The Poet (2005), was joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction.

Alexis Wright is one of Australia’s finest writers and a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her books include Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the outback town of Tennant Creek, the novel Plains of Promise, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and the NSW Premier’s Award. In 2007, Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and several other major literary awards in Australia.

Christopher Koch has won international praise and a number of awards for his novels, many of which are translated in a number of European countries. He has twice won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for fiction, for The Doubleman and Highways to a War. In 1995 Koch was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature. His most recent novel is The Memory Room.

Michelle Cahill is a Goan-Anglo- Indian migrant. Her collection The Accidental Cage was shortlisted in the 2007 Judith Wright Prize. Michelle edits the on-line journal Mascara, and she edited Poetry Without Borders. Riding Without Krishna is her fiction manuscript in progress. Her work has appeared in Heat, Southerly, Meanjin, Asia Literary Review, Muse India and The 2008 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology.

Morag Fraser is Adjunct Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University. From 1991 until 2003 she was the editor of Eureka Street magazine and her journalism career spans 35 years. She is a Miles Franklin Literary Award judge and was a member of the advisory board of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. In 2004 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia, for services to journalism and is currently the Philip Hodgins memorial medal judge.

Peter Goldsworthy has won major literary awards across a range of genres: poetry, short story, the novel, in opera and most recently in theatre. His novels have been translated into many European and Asian languages and have been adapted for the stage with five of his novels currently in development as movies and two more for the stage.

Peter Steele is Professor Emeritus, in English at the University of Melbourne. He has been a Jesuit for over 50 years and for six years was the Provincial Superior of the Jesuits in Australia and New Zealand. He has taught at many American universities, and spends six months each year at Georgetown University. He has published books on Jonathan Swift, autobiography as an art-form and on modern poetry. His latest poetry collection is White Knight with Beebox : New and Selected Poems.

Rhyll McMaster has worked as a poetry editor, a reviewer and a manuscripts and film scripts assessor. Her first novel, Feather Man, published in Australia in 2007 won two major awards. Feather Man was published in the UK, USA and Canada in 2008. It was favorably reviewed in The New Statesman and was chosen for special promotion through independent bookshops by the American Booksellers’ Association.

Robert Gray has published ten volumes of poetry, and his Selected Poems has been reprinted six times. His memoir, The Land I Came Through Last, is a portrait of his times, his eccentric relatives and some notable figures he has known. His poetry has been published in China, Germany, Holland and the UK. He has been a writer-in-residence in Asia, Europe, the UK and North America and has won many major Australian literary awards. He was a guest at the first Mildura Writers Festival in 1994.

Sophie Cunningham has worked as an editor and publisher for more than twenty years. Her first novel, Geography was published in Australia and the UK in 2004 and her second novel, Bird, was published in 2008. She is working on her third novel, This Devastating Fever, about Leonard Woolf’s time as a colonial administrator and the first years of his marriage to Virginia. She also writes occasional journalism, and is editor of Meanjin.

Ronald Sharp is Professor of English and former Dean of the Faculty at Vassar College in New York. Before moving to Vassar he was Provost and Acting President of Kenyon College and Editor of The Kenyon Review. His six books include two on Keats and The Norton Book of Friendship, which he co edited with Eudora Welty.

Paul Kane has published ten books, including four collections of poems. Among his awards are a Fulbright grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at Yale University and Monash University and is presently Professor of English at Vassar College. Together with his wife, Tina, he splits his time between New York and rural Victoria.

Rofel G. Brion’s poems have been published in three volumes; his first book won the Philippine National Book Award. He has been a fellow at various writing events including the Berlin International Literature Festival.

Alexis ‘Exie’ Abola is a prize-winning writer of short stories and essays. He writes an occasional column for the art and lifestyle sections of The Philippine Star. He teaches literature and writing at the Ateneo de Manila University.

Celeste ‘Cyan’ Abad-Jugo’s first book, Father and Daughter: The Figures of Our Speech, (Anvil 1996), is a joint project with her father, the poet Gémino H Abad. She has two collections of short fiction and writes a fantasy series for Mango Jam, a comics digest for girls.

Peter Beilharz & Trevor Hogan
Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology, La Trobe University

Virginia Trioli
ABC Radio’s drive time broadcaster and winner of two Walkley Awards.

Also Janet Shaw and Lisa Temple