Adaptations

Trent Dalton is the international bestselling author of 2023's number one bestseller, Lola in the Mirror. His books have sold over 1.2+ million copies in Australia alone. His debut novel Boy Swallows Universe broke records to become the fastest selling Australian debut novel ever is now a major global Netflix series. 

Holly Ringland is the author of the international bestseller The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which has been translated into thirty languages and adapted into a global seven-part TV series starring Sigourney Weaver and produced by Amazon Prime Video and Made Up Stories. In 2019, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won the Australian Book Industry Award General Fiction Book of the Year. In 2021, Holly co-hosted an eight-episode ABC TV series, Back to Nature, with Aaron Pedersen. After living between Australia and the UK for ten years, Holly has been based in the Yugambeh region of southeast Queensland since 2020, where she wrote The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding in her 'office', a vintage caravan named Frenchie. Upon publication, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding became an instant national bestseller, and it was named 2022 Book of the Year by Booktopia.

Bryan Brown is known as an actor, having appeared in over eighty film and television shows. He has worked in some twenty countries including his home country of Australia and the United States. Sweet Jimmy, consisting of seven short stories on crime, was released in 2021. The Drowning is his second book.

This is Witi Ihimaera’s 3rd appearance at Brisbane Writers Festival and he’s delighted to be back. A New Zealand writer of Maori descent he celebrates his 50th Anniversary as a writer with a newly revised version of Tangi (1973), the first novel by a Maori. Highly regarded internationally for his astonishing outpouring of fiction, films, edited works and plays he will be appearing in celebratory events in the USA (a children’s book congress celebrating The Whale Rider), Canada (an Ihimaera 4-film retrospective at the Presence Autochtone Film Festival), Germany (a Big Read Festival at Gutenberg University) and France (a month-long book and film tour). The Whale Rider is the most translated New Zealand novel. Another of his books, White Lies will be published soon in an Ethiopian Amharic Semitic edition. He has many national and international awards including a Chevalier des Arts and Lettres for services to indigenous literature. He lives in New Zealand.

Venero Armanno is a novelist and academic at The University of Queensland. He has published twelve books and was the winner of the Queensland Premiers Award for Best Fiction Book (2002) with The Volcano.