Hannah Moloney

https://goodlifepermaculture.com.au/about/

Hannah Moloney is a landscape designer, permaculture educator, best-selling author and change maker. She has two decades of hands-on experience in designing, building, managing and doing projects around urban agriculture, small-scale farming, permaculture and community development – all towards building climate resilience. She’s been a guest presenter on ABC’s Gardening Australia since 2019 and is an ambassador for Community Gardens Australia.  When she’s not working on other people’s gardens and farms, she’s working on her own.

Jane Tewson

Founder and Director of Igniting Change – a tiny charity passionate about sparking big, positive change for people doing it tough in our communities. Igniting Change is guided by people experiencing injustice and inequality, and brings people and resources together in creative ways to inspire action. Jane is innovator with a global reputation for inspiring individuals and organisations to work together for positive social change. She is ever-curious and drawn to the humanity and courage of people doing it tough. She is known for lateral thinking and creative initiatives, and has founded five charities that are all flourishing, including co-founding Comic Relief (Red Nose Day) in the UK, which has raised more than a billion pounds.

Jane has served on many boards including Oxfam, The Reichstein Foundation and The St James Ethics Centre. Jane was on The Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Committee and is a Trustee of Virgin Unite Australia, having served for 15 years as Vice Chair of Virgin Unite, which has a global remit.

Robbie Arnott

Robbie Arnott is the author of Limberlost, The Rain Heron, and Flames. His work has been awarded The Age Book of the Year and The Margaret Scott Prize, and been shortlisted for many other literary prizes, including the Miles Franklin Award. In 2019 he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. He is from Launceston.

Lee Kofman

www.leekofman.com.au

Dr Lee Kofman is a Russian-born, Israeli-Australian author based in Melbourne. Lee holds a PhD in social sciences and MA in creative writing. She is the author of three fiction books, and memoirs Imperfect (Affirm Press, 2019), which was shortlisted for Nib Literary Award 2019 and included in Books We Loved 2019 (The Age), and The Dangerous Bride (Melbourne University Press, 2014), which was included in Best Books 2014 (The Age and Australian Book Review) and 2015 (The Age). Lee is the editor of Split (Ventura Press, 2019), which was longlisted for ABIA Awards 2020, and co-editor of Rebellious Daughters (Ventura Press, 2016), anthologies of personal essays by prominent Australian authors. Her short works have been published in Australia, Scotland, UK, Israel, USA and Canada, and her writing won numerous awards. Her blog about writing was a finalist for Best Australian Blogs 2014. Lee also teaches writing.

Bert Spinks

Bert Spinks is a storyteller, poet, writer and bushwalking guide. He lives in the bush in northern Tasmania. For TVWF 2022, Bert is returning to his childhood stamping ground of Beaconsfield, and you can join him for a special guided walk experience.

Melissa Lucashenko

https://www.melissa-lucashenko.com/

Melissa Lucashenko is a leading novelist from Queensland. A Bundjalung woman, her work has been awarded the Queensland Deloitte Literary Prize, the Nita B. Kibble Award, and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing. In 2019 Too Much Lip won Australia’s premier writing prize, the Miles Franklin and the Queensland Award for a Work of State Significance. 

Melissa is also a Walkley Award winner for her Griffith Review essay “Sinking Below Sight: Down and Out in Brisbane and Logan”, and a founding member of prisoner human rights organisation Sisters Inside. 

Melissa writes about ordinary Australians and the extraordinary lives they lead.

Adam Thompson

Adam Thompson is a pakana writer from Launceston, Tasmania. His work has been published by the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Kill Your Darlings, Good Weekend, and Griffith Review – as well as appearing in several anthologies. Adam is the author of Born Into This, which won the Story Prize Spotlight award (US) and was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards, The Age Book of the Year, and the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.

Pip Williams

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills. She has spent most of her working life as a social researcher, studying what keeps us well and what helps us thrive, and she is the author of One Italian Summer, a memoir of her family’s travels in search of the good life, which was published in Australia to wide acclaim. The Dictionary of Lost Words was Pip’s first novel. It was the best-selling debut Australian fiction in 2020, the winner of five major Australian book awards, and shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. In May 2022, The Dictionary of Lost Words was the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick of the month. Pip’s new novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho is due to be published for Christmas 2022.

Kyle Perry

Kyle Perry is a drug and alcohol counsellor based in Hobart, Tasmania. He has grown up around the Tasmanian bush and seas, with the landscape a key feature of his writing and his spare time. He loves the sea, and his entire leg is covered in ocean tattoos.
His debut novel, The Bluffs, has been translated into eight languages. It was shortlisted for the Dymocks Book of the Year and the Indie’s Debut Fiction Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards’ General Fiction Book of the Year.

Kaytlyn Johnson

Palawa woman Kaytlyn Johnson is an inspiring youth leader and was named the 2022 Tasmanian Young Australian of the Year. Kaytlyn is in her third year at the University of Melbourne, on a Chancellor’s Scholarship studying Climate Science and Music.

In 2021, she won the First National Real Estate Leadership Award at the Tasmanian Young Achiever Awards, while also taking out the major category – the Premier’s Young Achiever of the Year Award. In November, she attended the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland to promote Youth Engagement within Climate Change conversations.

Kaytlyn was a key member of Project O – an initiative that empowers young rural women to develop new skills, connect with their communities, and use their voices to campaign for change. Their art initiative raised more than $12,000 for women and children experiencing family violence.

Kaytlyn is also a talented singer-songwriter with her music featured on Triple j Unearthed.

Jonathon Butler

https://jonathanbutler.com.au/the-boy-in-the-dress

Jonathan Butler is a writer living in Naarm/Melbourne. His debut book, The Boy in the Dress, is about the murder of his grandmother’s cousin and was published by Affirm Press on 22 February 2022. His work has appeared in the Guardian, ArtsHub, and Meanjin.

Robyn Mundy

Wild places form a big part of Robyn Mundy’s life, and her novels. Robyn has wintered and summered in Antarctica, the setting for her first novel The Nature of Ice. Her second novel Wildlight is set on remote Maatsuyker Island in south-west Tasmania, home to Australia’s loneliest lighthouse, where Robyn and her partner have spent 10 months alone as caretakers and weather observers. For more than 20 years Robyn has worked seasonally as a ship-based tour guide in Antarctica, Svalbard, East Greenland, the Norwegian coast, and wild Scotland. Her numerous visits to Svalbard led to the research and writing of her 2021 novel Cold Coast. Robyn lives in Hobart with a penguin biologist and a Blue Heeler.

Visit her on Instagram at robyncmundy.

Martin Flanagan

Martin Flanagan is the author of 20 books, a play, and two movie treatments. His last book, The Art of Pollination, is about social entrepreneur Jane Tewson.

Lucy Christopher

Lucy is a multi-award-winning and bestselling writer for young adults, children, and adults. Her work is psychological and emotional, often inspired by wild places. Her novels for young adults are Stolen, Flyaway, The Killing Woods, The Darkness, and Storm-wake, published in over twenty countries, and her picture books are Shadow and The Queen on Our Corner. Her first novel for adults, Release, has been recently published. Lucy has won many international awards including the Branford Boase, Printz Honor Award, Golden Inky, and the Prix Farniente. She was shortlisted for the Costa Award, Waterstones Prize, Australian Prime Minister’s Awards, and longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. She has a MA and PhD in Creative Writing, and is an experienced speaker at conferences and festivals. Previously, she was Reader in Creative Writing and Course Director at Bath Spa University. She is now Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing for the University of Tasmania.

Winnie Dunn

Winnie Dunn is the General Manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and the editor of several critically acclaimed anthologies, including Another Australia (Affirm Press, 2022). She is a writer of Tongan descent from Mount Druitt and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western Sydney University. Her work has been published in The Guardian, HuffPost Australia, Griffith Review, Meanjin and SBS Voices. Winnie is currently completing her debut novel, Dirt Poor Islanders (Hachette, 2023), which has been assisted by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Michael Mohammed Ahmad is the founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and editor of After Australia (Affirm Press, 2020). His debut novel, The Tribe (Giramondo, 2014), won the 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelists of the Year Award. His second novel, The Lebs (Hachette, 2018) received the 2019 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award. Mohammed received his Doctorate of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University in 2017. His latest novel is The Other Half of You (Hachette, 2021).

Meg Bignall

Meg Bignell began her writing career as a trainee copywriter with Win Television Tasmania. She went on to work as a commercial and corporate producer and presenter for television and later as a medical advisor for the Network Seven drama, ‘All Saints’. She continues to write — for stage as a cabaret performer, for film and for corporate clients. She is the author of three novels — ‘The Sparkle Pages’ (2019), ‘Welcome to Nowhere River’ (2021) and ‘The Angry Women’s Choir’ (2022) — all published by Penguin Random House. She lives on a dairy farm on the east coast of Tasmania with her husband, three children, one dog and one thousand cows.

Lyndon Riggall

Lyndon Riggall is a writer and teacher from Launceston whose work in poetry, prose and screenwriting has won local, national and international awards. His first picture book for children, Becoming Ellie, was created in collaboration with artist Graeme Whittle and published in 2019, while his most recent, Tamar the Thief (illustrated by Grace Roberts) was recently released for free on the Tamar Valley Writers Festival website.

Poppy Gee

Poppy Gee is the author of two literary thrillers which are set in Tasmania. Vanishing Falls (Harper Collins, USA; Booktopia Editions, Australia & NZ, 2020) is set in a fictional village near Westbury. Her debut novel Bay of Fires (Little Brown, Headline Review, Hachette Australia, 2013) is set on Tasmania’s beautiful east coast. Both novels are inspired by Tasmania’s fragile, raw beauty, its dark history and the diverse, interesting people who live on the island.

Poppy grew up in Launceston and currently lives in Brisbane. She has worked as a newspaper journalist and sub-editor, chief sub-editor of Girlfriend magazine, Courier Mail book reviewer, and taught journalism at QUT. She has a Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing degree from University of Queensland for. She is currently working on her third novel.

Polly McGee

https://www.pollymcgee.com/

Dr Polly McGee is an author, leadership consultant, trauma therapist and all purpose human being. They work, rest and play at the intersection of neurobiology, transpersonal psychotherapy and a good nap.

Dylan Hesp

Dylan Hesp is a Tasmanian writer, director and comedian who brings the loveable losers of our world to life on screen. Most known for his breakout role in Sando on ABC TV and for co-creating and starring in the smash hit YouTube series Australia’s Best Street Racer. Dylan has also performed as part of the Melbourne Comedy Festival’s prestigious Raw Comedy broadcast, fronted commercials for ABC TV, VISA and Huon Salmon and starred in series like Rosehaven, The Gloaming, and At Home Alone Together.
Currently, Dylan is producing a variety of projects for television and online alongside his creative partner Michael O’Neill through their production company Blur Films, including comedy series
Flat Earthers and a feature length follow up to Australia’s Best Street Racer.

Mallika Naguran

https://linktr.ee/MallikaTheWriter

Malika Naguran

Mallika Naguran is a writer of adult fiction and children’s books. She Never Looks Quite Back is her first collection of short stories published by Penguin Random House SEA in December 2021. The stories depict themes of nature, war, migration, reconciliation, the pandemic, and love. The narratives allow glimpses into lives conflicted by chance and choice.

Mallika also authored these retelling of classics—Ramayana: The Quest to Rescue Sita and Peter Pan in the POP! Lit for Kids series published by WS Education in 2021. She edits books and conducts workshops on creative writing as well. Born in Singapore, Mallika now lives in Tasmania where she loses track of time in forests with the pademelons.

Avery McDougall

Avery is a teacher-librarian by trade (BEdS UTAS; GDipIM RMIT) but was forced out of that career by her disability. She has always loved and stories and used them in her fight against chronic illness, culminating in the release of her YA novel Invisibly Grace in 2022. Avery is currently working as a freelance youth worker in creative spaces, as a manuscript reviewer, and writing her next novel with disabled protagonists that defy the inspiration trope. She lives in Launceston, Tasmania with her husband and bunny-shaped destruction goddess.

You can find her on IG, FB, and TikTok as @averymcdougall.author.

Vicki Madden

Vicki Madden is a producer, writer and showrunner with over 20 years experience in the television industry both in Australia and overseas. She has worked on such shows as Halifax FP, The Bill, (UK), Trial & Retribution (UK), and Water Rats. She was the writer for the 90-minute true crime telemovie for the 9 Network Blood Brothers. Vicki runs her own boutique film and TV company in Tasmania, her home state, and has co-created, co-produced and written the critically acclaimed TV crime drama series, The Kettering Incident and more recently, the highly commended Disney/Starz/AUS Gothic series, The Gloaming, set against the backdrop of Hobart. TKI won the Special Jury Prize at the prestigious Series Mania Festival in Paris, four AACTA awards, the SPAA award for most outstanding telemovie or mini-series, and two Logie awards for outstanding telemovie or mini-series. Vicki is currently developing a horror-thriller feature film set in Tasmania and TV show to be set on Macquarie Island.

Jock Serong

Jock Serong’s novels have received the ARA Historical Novel Prize, the Colin Roderick Award, the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction and, internationally, the inaugural Staunch Prize (UK) and the Historia Award for Historical Crime Fiction (France). He lives with his family on Victoria’s far west coast.

Ben Walter

Ben Walter is the author of the acclaimed short story collection, What Fear Was. His is a widely published writer of essays, stories, poetry and experimental nature writing; his work has recently appeared in Meanjin, New Australian Fiction and The Saturday Paper, and internationally in Lithub and Dark Mountain. He works as fiction editor at Island. 

Jane Rawson

Jane Rawson lives in the Huon Valley and works as a writer for a conservation organisation. Her latest novel, A History of Dreams, was published by Brio in 2022 – along with her second novel, From the Wreck, it is based on her family history. Her first novel, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, won the Most Underrated Book Award and From the Wreck won the Aurealis Award and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin. She is also the author of a non-fiction guide to surviving and living with climate change called The Handbook and a novella, Formaldehyde. Her essays on climate change, nature and speculative fiction have been published widely.

Ruby Ashby-Orr

Ruby Ashby-Orr has been working as a trade book editor since 2013 with experience at every stage of the editorial process including commissioning, structural editing, copyediting, proofreading, marketing (including cover development) and production. As Senior Editor with Affirm Press she has worked on a wide range of books including thrillers such as Christian White’s The Nowhere Child, historical fiction such as Pip Williams’s The Dictionary of Lost Words, major sport memoirs by Dennis Lillee and Kevin Sheedy and many others. She is based in Launceston.

Karen Brooks

Karen Brooks is the author of fifteen books – historical fiction, historical fantasy, YA fantasy, and non-fiction – was an academic for over 25 years, a newspaper columnist, and social commentator. She has a Ph.D. in English/Cultural Studies and is published internationally on popular culture, education, and social psychology. An award-winning teacher, she’s taught throughout Australia and in The Netherlands and keynoted at many education conferences. Nowadays, she finds contentment studying history and writing, and helping her husband in his Brewstillery, Captain Bligh’s.

She shares a beautiful stone house in Hobart, built in 1868, with hubby, adorable dogs and cats, and shelves brimming with books.

Michael Burge

Michael Burge is an author and Guardian Australia journalist who lives at Deepwater in the New England region of NSW. Tank Water (released by MidnightSun Publishing) is his first novel. Michael’s non-fiction debut Questionable Deeds: Making a stand for equal love lifted the lid on familial and institutional homophobia in Australia during the marriage equality campaign. He has written, edited, directed and broadcast for Guardian Australia, Fairfax Media, United News & Media, and Margo Kingston’s NoFibs. Michael’s article ‘Backwards to Bourke: Bulldust About Gays in the Bush’ appeared internationally in The Journal of Australian Studies. He is the director of the annual High Country Writers Festival in Glen Innes.

Lucinda Sharp

Lucinda danced with The Australian Ballet from 1974 to 1984 and, after her performance career, became a rehearsal director/teacher for several regional dance companies. She then studied at the University of Western Australia, graduating in 1999 with a master’s degree in clinical psychology. On completion of her studies, Lucinda worked (as a psychologist, in management roles, and as a consultant) in the performing arts for the Australian Ballet School, the Australian Ballet company, the Australian National Academy of Music, and in private practice. In 2012, Lucinda and her husband, Chris Champion, moved to Hobart where they own and operate Forty South Publishing, the largest Tasmanian book publisher and publishers of the iconic Forty South Tasmania (print and online magazine).