Funny About That

Siang Lu is the author of Ghost Cities and The Whitewash and co-creator of The Beige Index. The Whitewash won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2023, the Glendower Emerging Writer Award at the Queensland Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for a NSW Premiers Literary Award.

In 2023 he was one of the Top 40 Under 40 Asian-Australians at the Asian-Australian Leadership Awards.

Siang has written for film and television for Singapore's Beach House Pictures and Malaysia's Astro network.

Jonathan O'Brien is a Brisbane-based writer, educator, and creative freelancer, described as “a fresh and exciting voice” by The Guardian Australia. He was the recipient of a Brisbane Lord Mayor's Young and Emerging Artists Fellowship (2020), and the State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award (2017). Find him at jonobri.com.

Alexandra Collier is an award-winning writer who has written for theatre, screen and print. Her writing has appeared in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian. She lived in New York for a decade where her work was produced Off Broadway, including Triplight, a musical written with ARIA award-winning composer Greta Gertler Gold, and her plays Underland and Take Me Home. Her play Holy Day was a finalist for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, she is a MacDowell fellow and a winner of the RE Ross Trust Playwrights Award. She lives by the bay in Melbourne/Naarm with her son. Inconceivable is her first book.

Gregory Ladner is one of Australia’s most enduring fashion designers, having produced for markets in his home country, Europe and Asia over a career spanning more than four decades. As a boy he designed outfits for his teddy and as a teenager he dressed his mother and the neighbours. He went on to study fashion at Swinburne University before starting his career working for the legendary Melbourne establishment, Le Louvre, at the “Paris End” of Collins Street. Having risen to become one of Australia’s leading couturiers, he was head-hunted to revive the failing fortunes of Hong Kong’s luxury fashion house Shanghai Tang. Today, Gregory is the creator and designer of the hugely successful fashion accessory company that bears his name, with his distinctive millinery particularly sought after by women. A Boy and His Bear is Gregory’s first book. He 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.