Choices

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. 

Donna M Cameron is a playwright and AWGIE nominated radio dramatist who now writes novels. Her debut, Beneath the Mother Tree was listed as a 2018 top Australian fiction read in The Advertiser’s yearly round up and was selected for the 2019 QWC/Screen QLD’s Adaptable program. The manuscript of The Rewilding granted her a 2021 Varuna Fellowship, and Donna was recently accorded a Regional Arts Development Fund grant to work on her third novel, Bloomfield.

Georgia Harper is a psychologist who has worked with both serious violent offenders and victim-survivors of crime. Her career spans correctional, forensic mental health, mental health and rural psychology roles. She advises on LGBTIQ+ workforce matters and, in keeping with her passion for animal welfare, was the Senior Inspector Prosecutions for RSPCA Queensland. Born in Brisbane, Georgia currently lives and works on the beautiful Darling Downs, where she enjoys writing in her paddock under the supervision of her shire horse. What I Would Do to You is her first novel.

Katherine Allum is an award-winning fiction author. Her debut novel, The Skeleton House, won the 2023 Fogarty Literary Award and will be published by Fremantle Press in 2024. American-born, she grew up in four different states, but has strongest ties to Portland, Oregon and regional southwest Nevada. After spending several years in London, she now lives in Perth with her husband. She does her best story plotting while swimming.

Jen is a journalist, editor and writer originally from North East England. She runs a podcast – Northern Voices – that explores Northern UK writers, publishing and stories. She teaches writing, editing and journalism at Curtin University, where she's also doing her PhD in Creative Writing researching accent and class bias in UK fiction. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the Scotsman, the List and, recently, The Bookseller, among others. She also hosts the Readers & Writers Podcast for Arts Margaret River. She lives in Brisbane/Meanjin with her husband.