The Art of the Essay

Richard Flanagan has been described by the Washington Post as ‘one of our greatest living novelists’ and as ‘among the most versatile writers in the English language’ by the New York Review of Books. He won the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish and the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Question 7 was shortlisted for the Prix Femina étranger and the Prix du meilleur livre étranger as a novel, and won the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is the first and only author to have ever won both the Booker and the Baillie Gifford prizes.

Andrew O’Hagan has three times been nominated for the Booker Prize and is a winner of the E.M. Forster Prize. His novel Mayflies was adapted by the BBC and his latest, Caledonian Road, a state-of-the-nation epic, was a Sunday Times bestseller. He is Editor at Large of the London Review of Books.

Melissa Lucashenko is a multi-award-winning novelist from the Bundjalung nation. Too Much Lip won the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award and Edenglassie was released to critical acclaim in 2023. She is a Walkley Award winner, and her latest book is the essay collection Not Quite White in the Head.

Cameron Hurst is a writer and art historian who lives in Naarm/Melbourne.

Carody Culver is the editor of Griffith Review. She's also a writer and a literary interviewer. Her work has appeared in Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, Books+Publishing and more, and she's been a contributing editor for Peppermint magazine. Her chapbook, The Morgue I Think the Deader It Gets, was published by Cordite in 2022. You can find her on Substack at acriticalcondition.substack.com.