Traversing Tales

Cathy Van Extel is a reporter/producer for Radio National Breakfast based in Brisbane. She is a journalist with more than 20 years experience in radio reporting, presenting and documentary making. In 2001 she was awarded a Walkley Commendation for her ABC coverage of the September 11 terrorist attack. Cathy is a former Canberra Press Gallery journalist and presenter of Canberra Breakfast radio.

Lisa Dempster is the Director of Melbourne Writers Festival, and Chair of Right Now. Neon Pilgrim is her first memoir.

Nir Baram was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. His grandfather and father were both ministers in Israeli Labor Party governments. He has worked as a journalist and an editor, and as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians. He is the author of five novels, including Good People, which was translated into English for the first time in 2016. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages and received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew Literature.

Debra Jopson completed the first draft of Oliver of the Levant while participating in the first Faber Academy novel writing course held in Australia in 2011. Born in Sydney, she spent part of her childhood in Beirut and continued to visit her family there during the first rounds of the 1970s Lebanese civil war. She has worked as a journalist for major media outlets over four decades, most recently at The Sydney Morning Herald, where she specialised in Aboriginal affairs and major investigations, winning a Walkley award and numerous Human Rights Commission honours. Over the past three years she has devoted herself to writing fiction and long-form journalism, contributing to The Global Mail, The Saturday Paper, Good Weekend, ABCTV's Four Corners and SBS. In 2014, she became the Walkley Awards Freelance Journalist of the Year.