Author/Editor Episode #06: Trent Dalton, Scott Forbes & Catherine Milne

Catherine has worked in publishing for many years, including with Penguin Books, Allen & Unwin, and since 2012 with HarperCollins, where she is now Head of Fiction. Her list is eclectic, but consistently award-winning and bestselling. From literary fiction to crossover/bookclub fiction and narrative non-fiction, she looks for books that seize her and make her feel something –it’s all about heart and soul, meaning and joy. In recent years, that’s been books like Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence, Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies, Holly Ringland’s The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Stan Grant’s Talking to My Country, and Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss.

Trent Dalton is the author of Boy Swallows Universe (HarperCollins, 2018), a critically acclaimed international bestseller and winner of the 2019 Indie Book of the Year Award, the MUD Literary Prize, and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the People's Choice Award at the 2019 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. At the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards, the book won a record four awards, including the prestigious Book of the Year Award. Boy Swallows Universe has been published across thirty-four English language and translation territories. His second novel, All Our Shimmering Skies (HarperCollins, 2020) has also become a national bestseller.

Since its publication in June 2018, Dalton's critically acclaimed debut Boy Swallows Universe has become one of the most loved Australian novels of all time, breaking Nielsen Bookscan records to become Australia's fastest selling debut novel ever. In 2021, the Queensland Theatre Company stage production of Boy Swallows Universe saw such demand for tickets, the season was extended three times, resulting in a sold-out six-week run at 100% capacity in QPAC's Playhouse, seen by nearly 40,000 people.

Dalton is also a two-time winner of a Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism, a four-time winner of a Kennedy Award for Excellence in NSW Journalism and a four-time winner of the national News Awards Features Journalist of the Year.

Scott Forbes is a senior editor at HarperCollins, where he has worked with authors including Julia Baird, Jimmy Barnes, John Purcell, Robyn Cadwallader, Gabriel Bergmoser and Trent Dalton. He has also worked in-house for HarperCollins UK, Larousse and Weldon Owen, and as a freelance writer and editor for a wide range of publishers, including Bloomsbury, Reader's Digest and Lonely Planet.