Debuting in a Pandemic

Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and senior writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers, where she writes about politics, people and social affairs. In 2016, she won the Kennedy Award for Outstanding Columnist and in 2020 she won a Kennedy Award and a Walkley Award. She is also the recipient of the NSW Council of Liberties Journalism award. The Truth About Her is her first novel. She lives in Sydney.

Sophie Overett is an award-winning writer and cultural producer. Her stories have been published in Griffith Review, Going Down Swinging, Overland Online, The Sleepers Almanac, and elsewhere. She won the 2021 Kathleen Mitchell Award, the 2020 Penguin Literary Prize, as well as the 2018 AAWP x UWRF Emerging Writers' Prize, and her work has been shortlisted for multiple other awards including The Text Prize and The Richell Prize. She is one half of Lady Parts, a podcast about women's roles in genre cinema, and her debut novel, The Rabbits, was published by Penguin Australia in July 2021.

Lyndall Clipstone writes about monsters and the girls who like to kiss them. A former youth librarian who grew up running wild in the Barossa Ranges of South Australia, she currently lives in Adelaide, where she tends her own indoor secret garden. She has a Bachelors in Creative Writing and a Graduate Diploma in Library and Information Management.

Kathleen Jennings is a British Fantasy Award-winning author of Australian Gothic and folk- and fairy-tale-inspired fiction, and a World Fantasy Award-winning illustrator of fantasy and fairy tales, based in Brisbane. Her debut short story collection Kindling, published by Small Beer Press in 2024, follows her 2020 novel Flyaway and poetry collection Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Queensland, researching methods of creative observation.