Julie Janson is a Burruberongal woman of Darug Aboriginal nation and a novelist, playwright, and poet. Her novels are Madukka the River Serpent (UWA Publishing, 2022), which was longlisted for Miles Franklin Award 2023; Benevolence (Magabala, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award in 2022 and nominated for the NIB Literary Award in 2020 and the Voss Literary Award in 2020, and Compassion (Magabala, 2024).
John Kinsella’s most recent books of stories are Pushing Back (Transit Lounge, 2021) and Beam of Light (Transit Lounge, 2024). The three volumes of his collected poems are The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022), Harsh Hakea (UWAP, 2023) and Spirals (UWAP, 2025). His novels include Lucida Intervalla (UWAP, 2018), Hollow Earth (Transit Lounge, 2019), and The Mahler Erasures (Dalkey Archive, 2024).
Maria Takolander won the inaugural Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Her subsequent short-story collection, The Double (Text, 2013), was a finalist in the Melbourne Prize for Literature Best New Writing Award. She is also a poet, whose most recent poetry collection, Trigger Warning (UQP, 2021), won a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.