Writing Biography: Exceptional Women

Grantlee Kieza OAM held senior editorial positions at The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Courier-Mail for many years and was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his writing. He is a Walkley Award finalist and the author of twenty-one acclaimed books, including bestsellers Hudson Fysh, The Kelly Hunters, Lawson, Banks, Macquarie, Banjo, Mrs Kelly, Monash, Sons of the Southern Cross and Bert Hinkler. In 2018 he was inducted into the Australian Boxing Hall of Fame.

Ann-Marie Priest grew up in country South Australia, but has lived most of her adult life in rural Queensland. Recipient of the 2017 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, she published My Tongue Is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood in 2022. Her previous books are A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century, which was highly commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award, and Great Writers, Great Loves: The Reinvention of Love in the Twentieth Century. Her essays and reviews have appeared in many publications including Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Southerly, The Weekend Australian and The Age. She has a PhD from Macquarie University and works as a senior lecturer at Central Queensland University.

Michael Ondaatje is Head of the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, and Professor of History, at Griffith University. Michael is a prize-winning researcher and teacher and a regular commentator on American history and politics in the media. He is the author of Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press) and is currently writing a biography of Neville Bonner, the first Indigenous Australian elected to federal parliament (Melbourne University Press). Michael has been a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and was selected by the US Department of State for the International Visitor Leadership Program, the premier professional exchange program of the US government. He is also a recipient of the Max Crawford Medal — ‘Australia’s most prestigious award for achievement and promise in the humanities’ — and a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences.