Fun With Midlife Crises

Melanie is a writer, editor and researcher. Her debut novel Meet Me at Lennon's (UQP) won the 2018 QLA's Glendower Award for an Emerging Writer. Her work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Griffith Review, Arena Magazine, Overland, Hecate, TEXT and elsewhere. She is a winner of the 2022 Griffith Review Emerging Voices competition and the 2024 winner of the UQ Creative Writing Fellowship. She teaches at the University of Queensland. 

Toni Jordan has worked as a molecular biologist, quality control chemist, TAB operator and door-to-door aluminium siding salesperson. She is the author of six novels including the international bestseller Addition, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, Nine Days, which was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards and was named in Kirkus Review's top 10 Historical Novels of 2013, and Our Tiny, Useless Hearts, which was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Toni has been published widely in newspapers and magazines. She holds a Bachelor of Science in physiology and a PhD in Creative Arts. Toni lives in Melbourne.

Sita Walker is an English and Literature teacher in Brisbane. Her first piece, Love in the Time of Grandmother, was shortlisted in the SBS Emerging Writers Competition and was published by Hardie Grant in the anthology, Roots: Home is Who We Are. Before that, she dabbled in blogging and wrote short letters to her students. Her debut memoir, The God of No Good, was released in 2023 and received the Courier Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award.

Charlotte Ree is a devoted home cook and food lover. Her memoir, Heartbake, was published in May. It is fundamentally a feast for one, a memoir of self-love. When she isn't cooking or writing, Charlotte can be found with some of Australia's biggest authors as part of her day job as Head of Marketing for a major book publisher.

Dianne Yarwood worked in accounting and corporate advisory in London and Sydney. She also nurtured a love for cooking and catering. At the age of forty, with three young children, she became very ill, and her life was saved by an emergency doctor. This brush with mortality gave her the courage to do what she'd always wanted to do - write. Dianne lives in Sydney with her husband. The Wakes is her first novel.