Candice Fox’s first novel, Hades, won the Ned Kelly Award for best debut in 2014 from the Australian Crime Writers Association. She followed up with the award-winning sequel Eden, and in 2015, Fall. Candice’s latest work is Never Never, a gritty page-turner set in the Australian outback, which she has co-written with the world’s bestselling thriller author, James Patterson. Candice lectures in writing at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, while undertaking a PhD in literary censorship and terrorism.

Since being plucked from the Random House slushpile, Brisbane writer Kylie Kaden is now an internationally published author of women’s fiction (when she’s not wrangling her sticky brood of boys). Kylie followed her breakthrough debut Losing Kate, with another critically acclaimed suspenseful read, Missing You, in 2015.

Dr Anita Heiss is one of Australia’s most popular authors. She was a finalist in the 2013 Australian of the Year Awards and is an Indigenous Literacy Day Ambassador. Her most recent non-fiction book Am I Black Enough For You? won the 2012 Victorian Premier’s Indigenous Literature Prize and was a finalist in the Human Rights Awards (non-fiction). Anita is a proud member of the Wiradjuri nation of central NSW and her latest novel is Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms.

Natasha Lester worked as a marketing executive for ten years, including stints at cosmetic company L’Oreal, managing the Maybelline brand, before returning to university to study creative writing. She completed a Master of Creative Arts as well as her first novel, What Is Left Over, After, which won the T.A.G. Hungerford Award for Fiction. Her second novel, If I Should Lose You, was published by Fremantle Press. The Age newspaper described Natasha as “a remarkable Australian talent”, and her work has appeared in The Review of Australian Fiction and Overland, and the anthologies Australian Love Stories, The Kid on the Karaoke Stage and Purple Prose.

Hayley Singer completed her Doctorate in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, where she teaches in the School of Culture and Communication. Her creative and scholarly writing practices engage with ecofeminist politics and poetics. Hayley has been the recipient of the inaugural Grace Marion Wilson emerging writers award for creative non-fiction and the Felix Meyer Travelling scholarship. Her fiction, non-fiction, poetry and book reviews have been published in a number of Australian journals and anthologies, including, Meanjin, Page Seventeen, Writing from Below and Press 100: Love Letters (forthcoming).