Of Things Past

Nick Earls is the author of 28 books, most recently the novel Empires. Two of his novels have been adapted into feature films and five into stage plays. His writing has won awards in Australian, the UK and US. 

Bae Suah debuted as a writer in 1993 with the publication of a short story “A Dark Room in 1988” in the literary magazine Novel and Thought. Her many novels include A Greater Music, Untold Night and Day and It’s Far, Uru Is Going to Be Late. Her best-known short story collections are North Station and Snake and Water. She was awarded Hankook Ilbo Literary Prize in 2003, Dongseo Literary Prize in 2004 and Writer in Residence in Zürich in 2018.

Madelaine Lucas is the author of the debut novel Thirst for Salt and a senior editor of the literary annual NOON. Born in Melbourne and raised in Sydney, she moved to New York in 2015 to complete her MFA at Columbia University, where she now teaches in the graduate writing program. Her writing has been awarded the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and appeared in publications such as The Guardian, The Believer, Literary Hub and BOMB. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog.

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.