Matt was born in 1974 in Sydney, and lived in Adelaide for 15 years before returning to Sydney in 1997. He practised law for five years and now writes full-time. He is currently working on a new novel, a feature film script and several short film projects and is based in London.
Matt’s first novel (in sonnet form) Solstice, was shortlisted for the 1993 Australian/Vogel award and published, to critical acclaim, in 1994 by Allen & Unwin. His adaptation of the book for the stage was produced by the State Theatre Company of South Australia and Magpie Theatre at the 1996 Adelaide Festival. It was directed by Neill Gladwin and starred Kate Kendall and Nadine Garner with live jazz by Kate Ceberano and the Barney McAll trio. Matt has also written the screenplay for a short film, *Punch*, which screened in the 2007 Melbourne International Film Festival.
Matt’s second novel, Nomad, was published in 1997 by Hyland House and his third, Vellum, was runner-up for the 2001 _Australian_/Vogel award. It was published by Text Publishing.
Gillian Rubinstein grew up in England where she studied languages at Oxford University and worked in publishing, as a film critic and as a journalist before migrating to Australia in 1973.
Space Demons, her first novel for children, was published in 1986 and was on the bestseller list for two years in Australia. Since then Gillian has written 34 books including novels, short books and picture books and many short stories. Gilllian adapted her novel Galax-Arena for the stage. It was produced by Patch Theatre and the Adelaide Film Festival Centre Trust for Come Out Festival in 1995 and won the 1996 AWGIE Award for Best Theatre for Young People. Wake Baby is a play for children under eight years of age. It features acrobatics and puppetry and toured nationally in 1997 and internationally in 1998/9 to 20 countries, including a season on Broadway.
Gillian has won many awards in Australia and her work has been translated into several European languages and published in England and America.
Her most recent books are Terra-Farma, the sequel to Galax-Arena and The Whale’s Child. She lives in South Australia.
Deborah Ratliff was born in Sydney. She briefly taught art in secondary college before moving to London where she worked in a variety of jobs for several years – artist model, jeweller, cleaner, picture framer, gallery assistant. Since returning to Australia she has continued to work in the arts.
THE TREE was her first novel and she is currently working on her second. She lives in Melbourne.
Boori Pryor was born in North Queensland. His father is from the Birrigubba of the Bowen region and his mother from Yarrabah (near Cairns), a descendant of the Kungganji and Kukuimudji. Boori is a multi-talented performer and basketball player who has worked in film, television, modelling, sport, music and theatre-in-education. He is a recognised speaker on Aboriginal issues.
Boori is also an accomplished didjeridoo player who has performed solo with the Brisbane Symphony Orchestra and conducted a didjeridoo workshop for Yamaha, which was broadcast nationally on ABC Radio. He has performed in many schools throughout Australia, Europe and Asia.
In 1993 he received an award for ‘the promotion of Indigenous culture’, awarded by the National Aboriginal and Islander Observance Committee and in 1994 Boori performed for the ‘Musikantenstadl’ TV show. Televised from Austria it had a viewing audience of sixty million. In 1995 he performed in Sydney before Pope John Paul II during the beatification ceremonies for Mother Mary McKillop.
Boori has written several award-winning children’s books with Meme McDonald. These include MY GIRRAGUNDJI, THE BINNA BINNA MAN and NJUNJUL THE SUN.
Boori lives in Melbourne, but spends much of the year on the road. His stories are about finding strength within to deal with the challenges without, and his skill is to create positive visions of the future for both Indigenous and white people.
Sian Prior is a journalist, essayist, critic and award-winning short-story writer. She is also a teacher of journalism and creative writing, has been a broadcaster with ABC radio for 16 years, as well as being a musician and a singer.
Sian has been working as a freelance writer for over a decade. She contributed a weekly column to The Age newspaper for three years and writes opinion pieces, travel features, theatre, opera and book reviews for various Fairfax publications. She has written feature articles for Limelight, Rolling Stone, The Bulletin, A2, Good Weekend, The Big Issue, Habitat and other magazines.
Sian’s short fiction has been published in CONTEMPORARY SOUL (Visible Ink anthology 2005), XXI VISIBLE INKS (2009), TATTLE TALES (Visible Ink anthology 2006), NORMAL SERVICE WILL RESUME (Cardigan Press 2004) and THE SLEEPERS ALMANAC EDITION 7 (2011). Her essays have been published in Meanjin , TEXT journal and Rex Journal of New Writing. Sian contributed a chapter to the first Penguin anthology WOMEN OF LETTERS.
Sian is a winner of the Words in Winter short-story competition and in 2010 she was awarded a Glenfern Writers Studio Readings Fellowship. In 2012 Sian’s writing was short-listed for the Queensland Postgraduate Creative Writing Prize. The National Library of Australia recently archived Sian’s website as part of the Pandora project. In 2012 she was a judge of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award (VPLA) for Non Fiction and in 2013 she was on the VPLA Drama judging panel.
Sian’s first non-fiction book, SHY – A MEMOIR, was published by Text Publishing in 2014.
Dorothy Porter was a poet, verse novelist and librettist. Her first poetry collection LITTLE HOODLUM was published in 1976, the same year as her graduation from Sydney University. It established her as one of Australia’s most exciting writers. From the beginning her poetry was passionate, edgy, punchy and lucid.
Her first verse novel, AKENHATEN was published in 1992 to widespread acclaim. It tells the tale of the notorious pharaoh in his own seductive voice, a compelling story of incest, heresy and megalomania. A new edition of this work was published by Picador in 2008.
Dorothy’s best-known verse novel, THE MONKEY’S MASK was published in 1994. It is a mesmerising crime thriller that follows private investigator, Jill Fitzpatrick as she investigates the disappearance of a young woman. THE MONKEY’S MASK won the Age Poetry Book of the Year and the National Book Council’s Turnbull Fox Phillips Poetry Prize (the Banjo). In England it was named one of the books of the year in the Times. It was adapted for the stage as a multimedia one-woman show, and as a radio play for the ABC. In 2001 a film, based on the book, was released in Australia and around the world. THE MONKEY’S MASK is unique in Australian poetry publishing. It has been reprinted 8 times and is considered an Australian classic.
Dorothy has published a further five collections of verse, and four verse novels including WHAT A PIECE OF WORK which was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award in 2000. WILD SURMISE—an engrossing duet between two increasingly estranged voices: Alex Leefson, a brilliant, charismatic astronomer, and her angry, neglected husband, Daniel—was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award in 2003 and won the Adelaide Festival Award in 2004.
In 1996 Dorothy wrote the libretto for a chamber opera, The Ghost Wife, with Jonathan Mills as the composer. Based on a short story by Barbara Baynton, the opera premiered at the 1999 Melbourne International Arts Festival, opened the Sydney Festival in 2001, and played at the Barbican in London, in 2002.
The Eternity Man, another chamber opera, by Dorothy and Jonathan Mills premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2003. Based on the life of Arthur Stace who for almost 40 years roamed the streets of Sydney writing ‘Eternity’ on the footpaths, it was adapted for film, directed by Julien Temple and starring Grant Doyle and Christa Hughes. It premiered with a special Opera House screening at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2008 and was broadcast on the BBC in December 2008 and ABCTV in January 2009.
In July 2005, Warner Records released Before Time Could Change Us, a cycle of songs tracing a love affair from first passion to disilusionment, written by Dorothy Porter for composer Paul Grabowsky and singer Katie Noonan. It won the Aria (Australia’s major music awards) for Best Jazz Album of 2005.
In 2006 Dorothy Porter edited THE BEST AUSTRALIAN POEMS 2006 and in November that year she was a finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature.
Dorothy’s last verse novel, EL DORADO, was published by Picador Australia in 2007. It portrays the world of a child serial killer and it is unflinching in its moral exploration of innocence and betrayal. EL DORADO was shortlisted for the Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize (Age Book of the Year Award), the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature; the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and Best Fiction in the Ned Kelly Awards.
In December 2008, Dorothy Porter died suddenly and unexpectedly from complications associated with breast cancer. She had just completed her new collection of poetry THE BEE HUT (which was published by Black Inc in September 2009) and she was collaborating with Tim Finn on a rock musical,January.
In 2010 Black Inc published LOVE POEMS, a collection of Porter’s most powerful love poetry. THE BEST 100 POEMS OF DORTHY PORTER was published in 2013.
The loss of Dorothy Porter to the Australian literary community is immeasurable, but she has left an immense body of work, with more to come.
Margaret Plant is Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at Monash University, Melbourne. Her book VENICE : FRAGILE CITY 1797–1997 is published by Yale University Press. Her new book, ONE ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY OF ART IN AUSTRALIA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015.
Humphrey McQueen is a freelance historian and cultural commentator. Widely known in Australia through his books, radio commentaries, articles and public speeches he is in demand as a guest lecturer, critic and consultant.
Humphrey is the author of 19 books that cover history, the media, politics and the visual arts. His articles appear regularly in the Bulletin and his two classic books of Australian history A New Britannia and Social Sketches of Australia were reissued in 2004. His book * Framework of Flesh*, looking at the history of builders’ labourers and their unions, was published by Ginninderra Press, Adelaide, in 2009.
Nelika McDonald was born in Brisbane in 1983. She spent her twenties studying, travelling and working in lots of different jobs and highly recommends this approach to not having any money. She has been, at various times, a cleaner, a media reader, museum staff member and a sales assistant in a pet shop, a jewellery shop, a homewares shop, a clothes shop, a kitchen shop and a tea shop. Now, she gets to write whenever she likes, and is allowed to wear pyjamas and drink tea while she does it.
Meme McDonald is a graduate of Victoria College of the Arts Drama School. She began her career as a theatre and festival director, specialising in the creation of large-scale outdoor performance events. Since then she has worked as a writing, photography and, most recently, a film projects.
Meme has written a number of award-winning books with the Aboriginal performer Boori Pryor. My Girragundji won the CBC Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers. The Binna Binna Man won three major awards at the 2000 NSW Premier’s Awards, including Book of the Year – a prize which had never before been awarded to a children’s book. Njunjul the Sun, the final book in this trio, which is based on true stories from Boori’s life and illustrated by Meme’s photographs, won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Younger Readers in November 2002.
A book for young readers, The Way of the Birds was adapted for television as an animation in 2000. Put Your Whole Self In won the N.S.W. State Literary Award for non-fiction in the 1993 and the Braille and Talking Book Award in the same year. An exhibition of photographs from the book was shown at four separate venues on the eastern coast.
Her latest novel, Love Like Water, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2007.