Mothers and Others

Susan Johnson is the author of 14 books, published in Australia, the US, England and in European translation. Nine are novels, including the most recent, From Where I Fell (2022), shortlisted for the Voss Literary Prize. The others are collections she edited, as well as two memoirs, A Better Woman (1999), on motherhood, illness and writing, and the critically acclaimed Aphrodite’s Breath: A Mother, A Daughter and a Greek Island (2023), about living on Kythera. Susan Johnson’s books have been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Prize, the Christina Stead Award, the National Biography Award, the Nita B Kibble Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, among others. She has been awarded two residencies at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, and her manuscripts and papers are collected by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. 

Jessica Au has worked as a writer, editor and bookseller. Her novel Cold Enough for Snow (2022) won the inaugural Novel Prize and was published by Giramondo, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions, with translations in eighteen languages. It won the Victorian Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Award and the Queensland Literary Awards.

Ianto Ware is a writer, former zine publisher, and the author of two books; Twenty-One Nights in July: a Personal History of the Tour de France (2014), and Mother and I: The History of a Wilful Family (2021), both available through Hunter Publishers. He was the author of the long-running zines Westside Angst and Das Papierkrieg, the founding director of Adelaide’s Format Festival, the producer of the Festival of Unpopular Culture, and currently works as a researcher in urban policy. He was born in Adelaide, but now lives in Sydney with his wife, the artist Diana Baker Smith, their son Ellis, and two cats, Judith and Adrienne. 

Anne Casey-Hardy was born in Fremantle and grew up in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. She won the 2018 Peter Carey Short Story Award, was shortlisted for the 2019 VU/Overland Short Story Prize and was awarded a 2021 Varuna Residential Fellowship. Her short stories and poetry have been published in Meanjin Quarterly, Island Magazine, Overland Journal, Westerly Magazine and several anthologies. Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls (Scribner 2022) is her first book. She lives in Melbourne’s west with her husband, on Bunurong land. 

Joy Lawn reviews fiction for the Australian newspaper. Her reviews and interviews have also appeared in Australian Book Review, Magpies magazine, SMH/The Age, Books+Publishing and professional journals.

Joy is currently judging fiction for the Queensland Literary Awards and women’s crime writing for the Davitt Awards. She has judged the Prime Minister’s and NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Russell Prize for Humour Writing and other awards; blogs about literary fiction, young adult and children’s literature as ‘Joy in Books’ at ‘PaperbarkWords’ blog https://paperbarkwords.blog/ and loves moderating sessions at writers’ festivals.

Joy is fascinated by ideas and images and how authors and illustrators express these with truth and originality.