Dislocation and Dispossession

Ben Hobson is a teacher, and an author, based in Brisbane. To Become a Whale, his debut novel, was released in 2017. It was longlisted for the ABIA Debut Fiction award and shortlisted for the Courier-Mail's People's Choice Award. His second novel, Snake Island, a literary thriller, was released in 2019. He also runs Ben's Book Club, a monthly online book club for libraries, and the Burgers, Beers and Books podcast. The Death of John Lacey is his third novel, and was released in February, 2023.

Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia. Born in Perth she has spent most of her life in Naarm (Melbourne) or on the road. She has written 3 novels Terra Nullius (2019), The Old Lie (2019), and Enclave and a non-fiction book Lies Damned Lies: A personal exploration of the the impact of colonisation (2021). Her art criticism has been published in Spectrum, Artlink and Art Collector and in exhibition catalogues for NGV, AGSA and NGA and others. Her conceptual/video work Refugium won the Incinerator Art Award in 2021 and she will feature in a number of exhibitions in 2022. She writes novels, poetry, short-fiction, drama and essay and has featured in the Saturday Paper, the Guardian, Meanjin, Australian Poetry and many others. Her short fiction and poetry has been published in multiple anthologies.

André Dao is a writer, editor, and researcher. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Anam will be published in May 2023 by Penguin Random House Australia and in August 2023 by Picador UK. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting people’s experience of immigration detention, and a producer of the Walkley-award winning podcast, The Messenger.

Born in Iran, Pirooz Jafari migrated to Australia in mid-1990s as an ambitious photographer. His experience of witnessing violations of human rights of every imaginable kind throughout his childhood, adolescence and young adult life in Iran ignited a passion in him to pursue legal studies and Pirooz graduated as a lawyer in Australia in the summer of 2003. Pirooz has since worked in various community-based organisations and statutory bodies and he now runs his own consultancy. Forty Nights is his first literary fiction novel.

Martine Kropkowski is a writer and researcher based in Brisbane. She teaches professional and creative writing at The University of Queensland, where she also investigates conspiracy theories and high-demand groups as part of her PhD. Martine writes essays on literature and culture, and her debut novel Everywhere We Look is out in November 2024 with Ultimo Press.