Speed Reads Salon

Anna Kate Blair is a writer from Aotearoa living in Naarm. Her short stories and essays have appeared in publications including Cordite, Slow Canoe, The Appendix, Landfall, Meanjin, Litro, Archer and Reckoning. She holds a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Cambridge. Her first novel, The Modern, was published by Scribner in September 2023.

Brydie Lee-Kennedy is an Australian TV writer. She has written on shows for Netflix, Apple TV and Disney. In a former life she was a cabaret performer, kid's party entertainer and sex columnist. Go Lightly is her first novel.

Dave Witty is an Australian writer raised in the United Kingdom. He is the recipient of the 2021 Rosina Joy Buckman Award in The Nature Conservancy Nature Writing Prize, and his work appears in publications including Island, Griffith Review and Meanjin. What the Trees See is his first book.

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.

Esmé Louise James (@esme.louisee) is a PhD Candidate, TEDx Speaker, and creator of the Kinky History with over 3 million followers. She has produced a range of non-fiction articles for publications such as the Age, the ABC and the Conversation, as well as short stories and poetry, for publications such as Hardie Grant Press and Archer. Esmé’s book Kinky History was published by Pantera Press in Australia, and TarcherPerigee worldwide, in 2024. She received funding from Screen Australia's Every Voice initiative for the TikTok series, SexTistics, and was nominated for Best Digital Creator at the 2022 AACTA Awards. In 2023, Esmé was honoured with the University of Melbourne's Rising Star Alumni Award.

Graham Akhurst is a Kokomini writer who grew up in Meanjin. He is a Lecturer of Indigenous Studies and Creative Writing at UTS. Graham began his writing journey in a hospital bed in 2011. He read and started journaling while passing the time between treatments for Endemic Burkett Lymphoma. As a Fulbright Scholar, Graham studied for an MFA in Fiction at Hunter College, NYC. He is a board member for the First Nations Artists and Writers Network and Varuna. 

Jarad Bruinstroop’s debut poetry collection, Reliefs, won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and is available now through UQP. He won the 2023 Val Vallis Award. His work has appeared in The Best of Australian Poems, Meanjin, Overland, and elsewhere. As the University of Queensland Fryer Library Creative Writing Fellow, he is developing a novella cycle that draws on Brisbane’s Queer history. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from QUT where he also teaches.