Before becoming a novelist, Michael Robotham was an investigative journalist working across America, Australia and Britain, covering the serial killings of Fred and Rosemary West and other similarly notorious cases. He has worked alongside clinical and forensic psychologists in their close examination of the darker recesses of the criminal mind. Michael’s 2004 debut thriller, The Suspect, sold more than one million copies around the world. Michael has also written five standalone thrillers, including The Secrets She Keeps, which was adapted for television in 2020. In 2015, he won the UK’s prestigious Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award with his standalone thriller Life or Death and in 2020, he won the award a second time for the first novel in his Cyrus Haven series, Good Girl, Bad Girl. He lives in Sydney.
Emma Viskic is an award-winning Australian author. Her critically acclaimed debut Resurrection Bay was shortlisted for two CWA Daggers and won five Australian awards. Its sequels, And Fire Came Down and Darkness For Light, both won Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards and were shortlisted for the Barry Award for Best Paperback in the USA. Emma studied Australian sign language (Auslan) in order to write the Caleb Zelic thrillers, of which Those Who Perish is the fourth. In her former career as a classical clarinettist, Emma performed with José Carreras and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and once played at an engagement party that ended in a brawl.
Ian Gill is an Australian-born author, journalist, critic, conservationist and, since 2020, co-founder of Upstart & Crow, a bookstore and literary arts studio on Vancouver’s Granville Island. He is a contributing editor at The Tyee and co-founder of a west coast bioregional initiative called Salmon Nation. He worked for almost 20 years as CEO of Ecotrust in Canada, the US and Australia and has extensive experience in community and economic development in coastal communities along North America’s west coast. His book on Haida Gwaii, All That We Say is Ours, is being re-released in paperback in early 2022.
Alicia Sometimes is an Australian poet, writer and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word and poetry at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems and more. She is director and co-writer of the art/science planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave. Her TedxUQ talk in 2019 was about combining art with science. In 2020 Alicia won the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize. She is completing a Boyd Garret residency for the City of Melbourne and Virtual Writer in Residency for Manchester City of Literature and Manchester Literature Festival.
Lidia Morawska is Distinguished Professor at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and the Director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at QUT, which is a Collaborating Centre of the World Health Organization on Research and Training in the field of Air Quality and Health. She conducts fundamental and applied research in the interdisciplinary field of air quality and its impact on human health and the environment, with a specific focus on science of airborne particulate matter. She is a physicist who received her doctorate at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland and a recipient of numerous scientific awards.
Lenore Manderson is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her research focuses on inequality, the social context of infectious diseases and chronic conditions and increasingly, the environment in Australian, Asian and African settings. She has published extensively, including on disability and embodied change, Surface Tensions (2011) and on Covid, Viral Loads (with Nancy J.Burke and Ayo Wahlberg, 2021). She was awarded the Society of Medical Anthropology Career Achievement Award in 2016, and in January 2020, was admitted as a Member of the Order of Australia.
Laura Jean McKay holds a PhD focusing on literary animal studies and she is currently the “animal expert” presenter on ABC Listen’s Animal Sound Safari. Her work has been published in numerous outlets and has been shortlisted for several awards. The Animals in that Country is McKay’s debut novel.
Maria Tumarkin is a writer and cultural historian. She is the author of three previous books of ideas Traumascapes, Courage, and Otherland, all of which received critical acclaim in Australia, where she lives. Her most recent work, Axiomatic, won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award. Tumarkin collaborates with visual artists, audio creatives, psychologists, and historians, and holds a PhD in cultural history from the University of Melbourne, where she teaches in the creative writing program.