Between Cultures

Winnie Dunn is Tongan-Australian writer from Mount Druitt. She is the general manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and the editor of several critically acclaimed anthologies including Sweatshop Women (2019) and Another Australia (2022). Winnie's debut novel is Dirt Poor Islanders (2024).

Melanie Saward is a proud Bigambul and Wakka Wakka woman. She is a writer, editor, and university lecturer based in Tulmur (Ipswich), Queensland. Her debut novel Burn was published by Affirm Press in 2023 and she’s also had work published in the literary journals Griffith Review, Meanjin, Overland, Kill Your Darlings, and has fiction published in the anthologies Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now, and New Australian Fiction. Her first romantic comedy novel, Love Unleashed, will be published by Penguin Random House in August.

Jade Kake is director and founder of Matakohe Architecture and Urbanism and a part-time lecturer at Huri te Ao School of Future Environments at AUT. She is also a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Jade is the author of Rebuilding the Kāinga – Lessons from Te Ao Hurihuri, Rewi: Āta haere kia tere, co-authored with Jeremy Hansen. She has contributed chapters in collections about architecture and design and has also written for Stuff, The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch, ArchitectureNOW and Metro. She has won awards for architectural writing, received the Emerging Māori Writer’s Residency at the Michael King Writers Centre in 2019, and received the Copyright Licensing New Zealand and New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa Writers’ Award in 2021. In 2020, she was a participant on Te Papa Tupu writers’ mentoring programme. Checkerboard Hill is her first novel. 

Sara M Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants based on Bidjigal land. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the ground-breaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity. Her first novel is Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm Press, 2023) and her first full-length poetry collection is The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat were both released late 2023.

Sara is the first and only poet to win both the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the inaugural Affirm fellowship for Sweatshop writers, a Neilma Sidney travel grant, Varuna writers residency, and Amant writers residency in New York, amongst other honours

Yen-Rong is an arts critic and award-winning writer based between Yugambeh and Jaggera and Turrbal lands. She won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer in 2022 and the Queensland Premier's Young Publishers and Writers Award in 2020. Her work has appeared in many print and online publications, including The Guardian, Meanjin, The Sydney Review of Books, and Griffith Review. Me, Her, Us (UQP) is her debut work of non-fiction.