Machismo

David Goodwin is the author of Servo, a side-splitting and darkly mesmeric memoir of six long years of weekend graveyard shifts in service stations across Melbourne's wild west. He is, thankfully, no longer a day-sleeper with a halogen tan, but still maintains a ruinous predilection for vodka-spiked slurpees and sausage rolls with too much tomato sauce.

Joel Deane is a novelist, poet, journalist and speechwriter. A freelance writer, he previously worked in newspapers, television, politics and internet startups in Australia and the US. Deane has published seven books, including Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power and Year of the Wasp. His most recent work, the novel Judas Boys, has been compared to Lord of the Flies.

Dominic Gordon is from Melbourne. His work has appeared Meanjin, The Suburban Review, and other literary journals. In 2016, he created and produced a radio play that was broadcast on Radio National’s, Soundproof program, called Cooked in the Big Smoke. In 2018, Dominic was awarded a Berry Family Fellowship at the State Library Victoria, where he began what would become his first book, Excitable Boy: Essays on Risk. 

Shivram Gopinath is a writer and spoken word performer from Chennai, and calls Singapore home. A twice-winning National Singapore Poetry Slam champion, he has performed at Singapore Writers Festival, Borobudur Writers and Cultural Festival, Jaipur Literary Festival, among others. His work often contends with notions of identity, community and absurdity, as a way of exploring cross-cultural experiences. He is the author of the upcoming Dey (Ethos Books, 2024).

Simon Cleary is the author of three novels, including The Comfort of Figs (2008), which was published after the manuscript was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. His second novel, Closer to Stone (2012), was inspired by his experiences in North Africa at the commencement of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s. It went on to win the Queensland Literary Awards People’s Choice Award. Simon’s third novel, The War Artist, was published in 2019. Everything is Water (2024) is his first work of non-fiction. He is a life-long walking and environmental enthusiast, and lives in Brisbane.