Dr. Adrian Martin is Senior Research Fellow, Film and Television Studies, Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). He is the author of Qué es el cine moderno? (Santiago: Uqbar, 2008), Raúl Ruiz: sublimes obsesiones (Buenos Aires: Altamira, 2004), THE MAD MAX MOVIES (Sydney: Currency/ScreenSound, 2003), ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (London: British Film Institute, 1998) and PHANTASMS (Melbourne: Penguin, 1994).
He is the Co-Editor of Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage (Melbourne: Rouge Press/Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2004), MOVIE MUTATIONS (BFI, 2003) and the Internet film journal Rouge (www.rouge.com.au). He has won the Byron Kennedy Award (1994), the Pascall Prize for Criticism (1997), and the Mollie Holman Award (2006).
Award-winning photographer Megan Lewis was born and raised in rural New Zealand. At the age of 21, she moved to Sydney and was employed by Reuters. During that time Megan’s work regularly appeared in various international publications including the Washington Post, theInternational Herald Tribune and a front cover of Timemagazine.
In early 1998, Megan was lured by the Australian newspaper to their Perth bureau, where she continued to cover national and international stories including the Tampa crisis, Queen Elizabeth’s tour of Australia, riots in Indonesia and the first tremors of East Timor’s bid for independence. In July 2002, on a gut feeling and with an invite from the Martu people, Megan left the Australian to live full time in the Great Sandy Desert. The result of this five-year privilege is CONVERSATIONS WITH THE MOB, whose images won a 2005 Walkley Award and then were voted winner of the 2006 Photographers Choice Awards.
Megan is now based in Perth, working as a freelance photographer. During her career Megan has worked in many challenging locations and situations. She has photographed all manner of people – from the most exalted to the most destitute. She remains an optimist.
Elaine Lewis was originally a music educator, writing music courses and teaching Music, French and English in Australia. She also published educational material and songbooks.
Elaine’s love of the French language led her to translate the works of poets from France, Belgium and Canada many of which have been published in the Paris review, La Traductiere.
She established the first Australian Bookshop in Paris in order to promote Australian writers. Between 1996 and 2003 she organised more than 70 readings for visiting Australian authors. Her book, LEFT BANK WALTZ: THE AUSTRALIAN BOOKSHOP IN PARIS tells the story of the shop and the struggle with French bureaucracy to keep it open.
Carolyn Landon co-authored with Daryl Tonkin her best known book, Jackson’s Track, Memoir of a Dreamtime Place. Since then she completed a Masters Degree with the School of Historical Studies at Monash (Clayton) in Biography and Life Writing in order to solidify her skills as an oral historian. The result was her book, Jackson’s Track Revisited which was an examination of differing viewpoints of one story of Aboriginal assimilation using oral testimony and archival records. Cups with No Handles; memoir of a grassroots activist, a biography of Bette Boyanton whom Joan Kirner calls “one of the warriors”, came out in 2008.
Carolyn’s current work, BLACK SWAN: A KOORI WOMAN’S LIFE is the biography of Eileen Harrison, Aboriginal artist from Gippsland.
Elizabeth Jolley is the author of 15 novels and four short-story collections. Her numerous awards include the Age Book of the Year Award, the Age Fiction Prize, the Miles Franklin Award, the National Book Council (Banjo) Award, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, WA Critical and Historical Prize and WA Premier’s Fiction Award.
LEARNING TO DANCE, a new collection of work edited by Caroline Lurie was published in 2006 followed by a paperback edition in 2007.
Eva Hornung was born in Bendigo, Victoria in 1964. As Eva Sallis, she is a writer of literary fiction and criticism. Many of her works explore ideas on culture, exile and belonging. Her first novel Hiam won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for 1997, the Nita May Dobbie Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Courier-Mail Book of the Year 1999 and the National Fiction Award 2000.
She has studied Arabic intensively for seven years and travels regularly to the Middle East, particularly Yemen and Lebanon. She is working on translating stories from the Yemeni writer Abd al-Kareem al-Razihi, and has published two of these in the literary journal Heat in 2005.
The Marsh Birds, set in Iraq, Syria, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, won the Asher Literary Award 2005 and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year 2005; NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2006; National Fiction Award, Festival Awards for Literature 2006; and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book South East Asia and Pacific Region 2006.
Eva’s latest novel, Dog Boy was published in 2009 by Text Publishing in Australia. Publication in other countries followed: USA: Viking; UK: Bloomsbury; Canada: HarperCollins, Italy: Piemme; Germany: Suhrkamp; Netherlands: House of Books; Spain: Salamandra; Portugal: Presença; Brazil: Paz e Terra; France: City Editions; Russia: Centrepolygraph; Denmark: Klim; Sweden: Forum; Israel : Aryeh Nir Publishers. Forthcoming editions include: Marathi: Mehta Publishing; Hungary: Nouvion; Chinese (Complex): Apocalypse Press.
Dog Boy won the Fiction category of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2010. It was shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the ASL Gold Medal and the Literary Fiction Book of the Year, ABIA.
Judy Horacek is a well-known Australian cartoonist and writer. Horacek cartoons are found on greeting cards, tea towels, t-shirts, aprons, mugs and fridge magnets throughout the world. She also makes limited edition prints. Her work has appeared in the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and numerous magazines and journals.
Six collections of Judy’s work have been published, the most recent of which is Make Cakes Not War which was published in Australia by Scribe and in the USA by Andrews McMeel. Her first picture book, Where is the Green Sheep? won the Children’s Book Council of the Year award for Early Childhood in 2005. Judy has since published the delightful Growl, These are My Feet and These are My Hands. Her new picture book, Yellow is my favourite colour, was recently published by Penguin.
Judy’s cartoon collection If you can’t stand the heat was published by Scribe in October 2010 and prompted Readings to call for ‘Judy for PM!’
Jenny Hocking is Professor and Director of Research with the National Centre for Australian Studies in the School of Humanities, Communications and Social Sciences at Monash University. Jenny is widely published on aspects of contemporary Australian politics, national security and labour history.
A frequent political commentator, Jenny has addressed the National Press Club, the Australian Institute of International Affairs and the Sydney Institute and is a regular contributor of opinion pieces and book reviews to the Canberra Times, the Age, the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. She has also had recent appearances on Radio Netherlands, Australia Talks Back (Radio National) and The Law Report.
Professor Jennifer Hocking is the author of the acclaimed LIONEL MURPHY: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (1997, 2000) short-listed in the South Australian Festival Awards for Best Non-Fiction, and has written two books on Australia’s counter-terrorism security legislation. Her biography of the late Australian author Frank Hardy was published in 2005 and was shortlisted in the New South Wales History Awards for 2006.
Her book, GOUGH WHITLAM: A MOMENT IN HISTORY was published by Melbourne University Press in 2008 and the second part of this biography GOUGH WHITLAM: HIS TIME in 2012.
Poet, Kristin Henry, was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and spent much of her childhood travelling throughout the American south before migrating to Australia at eighteen. She fell instantly in love with Melbourne and that’s where she’s stayed, raising two excellent children, then writing and teaching. She is the author of five collections of poetry and two non-fiction books. Kristin has read and performed her work across Australia, in the United States and the United Kingdom. ALL THE WAY HOME is her first novel in verse.
Lian Hearn studied modern languages at Oxford University and worked as a film critic and arts editor in London before settling in Australia. A lifelong interest in Japan led to the study of the Japanese language and many trips to Japan. This fascination culminated in the writing of Across the Nightingale Floor, the first in the internationally acclaimed Tales of the Otori series. Grass for his Pillow, Brilliance of the Moon and The Harsh Cry of the Heron follow.
This remarkable series has been sold into 36 territories and has sales of over four million copies. Film rights have been sold to Universal Studios for Kennedy Marshall.
The last book in the series, the prequel Heaven’s Net is Wide, was published in 2007.
Blossoms and Shadows, was published by Hachette Australia in October 2010.
Lian Hearn’s latest book, THE STORYTELLER AND HIS THREE DAUGHTERS was published in 2013 in Australia.