Chris Wallace-Crabbe AM has a worldwide reputation, while his most recent books of verse include New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2013). He has chaired Australian Poetry Limited and is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. Also a public speaker and commentator on the visual arts, he specializes in “artists’ books”, and all that they might mean. Read It Again, a volume of critical essays, was published in 2005. Among other awards he has won the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences and the Christopher Brennan Award for Literature

Craig Sherborne’s memoir Hoi Polloi was shortlisted for the Queensland and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The follow-up, Muck, won the Queensland Literary Award for Non-fiction. Sherborne has also written two volumes of poetry, and his journalism and poetry have appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies. His novel, The Amateur Science of Love won the 2012 Melbourne Prize for Writing.

Frank Moorhouse was born and raised in the coastal town of Nowra, New South Wales. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator before becoming a full-time writer.
Grand Days, the first novel in the Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.

Jane Smiley is the author of many novels and works of nonfiction, including A Thousand Acres, Horse Heaven, The Man who Invented the Computer, a series of YA horse books, and most recently, Private Life. She lives in California, USA.

Lisa Jacobson is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her new verse novel is The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press, 2012). This book was recently shortlisted for the inaugural 2013 Stella Prize. It has also been shortlisted for the 2012 Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize and, as a manuscript, for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. She has won the 2011 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize and the HQ Short Story Prize. Her work is represented inPeter Porter’s Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, Heinemann’s Best Short Stories (U.K.) and Adrian Hyland’s Kinglake 350. She shares a bush block in Melbourne with her partner and daughter.

Michele Leggott was the Inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007-09. Her most recent publications are northland (Pania Press, 2010), Mirabile Dictu (Auckland UP, 2009) and a CD of selected poems, Michele Leggott / The Laureate Series (Braeburn/Jayrem 2009). She coordinates the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (NZEPC) with Brian Flaherty at the University of Auckland.

Trevor Hogan teaches in sociology at La Trobe University. He is Deputy Director of Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University. In his capacity as a Coordinating  Editor of the  journal, Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology (Sage:  London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC) he has recently edited themed issues on India (‘Popular Media Cultures in India’, #113, December, 2012) and the Philippines (‘Manila’s urbanism and Philippine visual cultures’, #112, October, 2012).  He is also Director, Philippines-Australia studies Centre,  La Trobe University. With Professor Peter Beilharz he edited Sociology: Antipodean Perspectives (Oxford University Press, Melbourne: 2012) in which he also contributed chapters on Australian Cities, Perth (with Terri-Ann White), Papua New Guinea (with Christine Ellem) as well as the keynote argument chapters with Beilharz.   In 2012 he also published articles on Asia’s gated communities and private cities (with Tim Bunnell et al.), Manila (with Peter Murphy), a history of the Australian Recording Industry (with Clinton Walker and Peter Beilharz), a photo essay on Manila (with his son, Caleb J. Hogan), and a review of David Walker’s Memoir, Not Dark Yet.

Watson grew up on a farm in Gippsland, took his undergraduate degree at La Trobe University and a PhD at Monash University and was for ten years an academic historian. Death Sentence, his book about the decay of public language, was a best seller and won the Australian Booksellers Association Book of the Year. Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words was published in 2004 and encouraged readers to renounce what he perceives to be meaningless corporate and government jargon that is spreading throughout Australia, and to embrace meaningful, precise language. His latest book, American Journeys is a narrative of modern America from Watson's travels in the United States following Hurricane Katrina. It was published by Knopf in 2008 and won both The Age Book of the Year non-fiction and Book of the Year awards. It also won the 2008 Walkley Award for the best non-fiction book.

Chloe Hooper's reports from the inquest into the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island won her a Walkley Award and were published around the world. The Tall Man is the story of the death of Cameron Doomadgee. The Tall Man tells the full story of the subsequent trial and its repercussions through northern Australia. Chloe Hooper's first novel A Child's Book of True Crime was published in many languages. It was a New York Times Notable Book and short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Chloe's latest novel is The Engagement, to be published in late August 2102. She lives in Melbourne.

Leslie Allan Murray (born 1938) is the outstanding poet of his generation and one of his country's most influential literary critics. A nationalist and republican, he sees his writing as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian. Murray's poems are remarkable for their diversity and range, but a number of themes run through them from start to finish. Chief among these are his celebration of life and nature in all their diversity; his sense of the sanctity of human existence, and yet of its pathos as well; his association with 'the people,' particularly common country folk, and a concomitant distrust of elites; and his strong sense of what it means to be an Australian, paradoxically combined with a deep-rooted cosmopolitanism resulting from his wide reading in a range of languages.

Tony Birch is the author of Shadowboxing (Scribe, 2006) and the short story collection Father’s Day (Hunter, 2009). Tony's debut novel, Blood, was shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin and Melbourne Literature Prizes in 2012. He is a frequent contributor to ABC local and national radio and a regular guest at writers’ festivals. He lives in Melbourne where he teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.