César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949. Since 1967 he has lived in Buenos Aires. He has published more than 70 books of fiction and criticism. Varamo is the seventh of his novels to appear in English translation, after The Seamstress and the Wind...

Adam Aitken grew up in London, Thailand and Malaysia, before coming to Australia in 1968. His previous book, Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles, was shortlisted for the South Australian Festival Award for poetry and the Age Book of the Year Award. Eighth Habitation, his...

Ali Alizadeh writes about history, memory, revolutions and love. He grew up during a war in the Middle East and migrated to Australia as a teenager. He dropped out of a Civil Engineering degree to become an artist. He received a PhD for writing an epic poem about Joan...

Eunice Andrada is a Filipina-Australian poet, journalist, lyricist and teaching artist based in Sydney. Featured in the Guardian, CNN International, ABC News and other media, she has also performed her poetry on diverse international stages, from the Sydney Opera...

Maryam Azam is an Australian-born Muslim millennial who lives and works in Western Sydney. She graduated with Honours in Creative Writing from Western Sydney University and holds a diploma in the Islamic Sciences. She is a recipient of the WestWords Emerging Writers’...

Luke Beesley is an artist and a musician as well as a poet, and this unique combination of skills is evident in his poetry. He was born in Brisbane and lives in Melbourne. In addition to his books New Works on Paper, Balanceand Lemon Shark, his poetry has been...

Vanessa Berry is a Sydney writer and artist who works with history, memory and archives. She is the author of the memoir Ninety9 (Giramondo 2013), the 'autobiographical almanac' Strawberry Hills Forever (Local Consumption 2007) and Mirror Sydney (Giramondo 2017), an...

Judith Beveridge is one of Australia most acclaimed poets, taught in high schools and universities, winner of the NSW and Victorian Premiers’ Awards, a highly regarded critic, editor and teacher of poetry. She has published six collections of poetry which have won...

Michael Brennan’s first collection The Imageless World won the Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award; his second Unanimous Night won the William Baylebridge Award and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s...

Lachlan Brown grew up in Macquarie Fields in South West Sydney. His first collection, Limited Cities (Giramondo, 2012), was commended for the Mary Gilmore Award. His poems have been shortlisted and highly commended for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Canberra...

Joanne Burns’ most recent collections are footnotes of a hammock, joint winner of the Judith Wright ACT Poetry Prize, an illustrated history of dairies, shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Poetry Award, and amphora. Her poems are studied in high schools and have been...

Michelle Cahill is the author of fiction, essays and two collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Vishvarupa, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Born in Kenya, she attended primary school in London before migrating to Australia. She...

Luke Carman self-identifies as an anti-folk monologist working in epi-grammatical short fiction. He hails from the Sydney suburb of Liverpool and his work has haunted the journals HEAT, Westside and Cultural Studies Review.

Bonny Cassidy is a poet, essayist and critic, whose first collection, Certain Fathoms, was shortlisted for the 2012 Western Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. Her poetry has featured in the John Leonard Press Young Poetsanthology, and in Black Inc’s Best Australian...

Felicity Castagna won the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction for her previous novel, The Incredible Here and Now, which was shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia and NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and adapted for the stage...

Brian Castro is the author of the prize-winning Australian classic Shanghai Dancing, and recipient of the 2014 Patrick White Literary Award. His recent novels include The Garden Book and The Bath Fugues, both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and...

Kim Cheng Boey was born in Singapore and migrated to Australia in 1997. He has published four award-winning collections of poetry, and teaches at the University of Newcastle.

Influenced by the young adult book series Sweet Valley High, Tom Cho began writing fiction in his mid-teens. His stories have appeared in many publications in Australia and overseas, and he has performed at festivals around the country, including in the award-winning...

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s first collections of poetry little bit long time and Kami (2010) both quickly sold out their first print runs. Her verse novel His Father’s Eyes was published by OUP in 2011. Her second verse novel Ruby Moonlight won the inaugural kuril dhagun...

Marcelo Cohen (Buenos Aires, 1951) is a widely respected and highly innovative Argentinian novelist, who has invented a distinctively South American kind of speculative fiction. In an ambitious series of novels and stories he has constructed a future world, the...

Shevaun Cooley is a poet, essayist, and climber. Her poems have been published in Cordite, Island, Poetry Wales, Meanjin, Southerly and The Best Australian Poems, and have been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and the University of Canberra...

Mariana Dimópulos was born in Buenos Aires in 1973. She studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. She is the author of three novels as well as short stories and non-fiction, including a critical study on the...

Lucy Dougan’s first poetry book, Memory Shell won the Mary Gilmore Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. Her second collection, White Clay, was published by Giramondo in 2008. In 2006 the manuscript of White Clay won the Arts ACT Alec Bolton...

Martin Edmond’s works of memoir and biography about art and artists include Dark Night: Walking with McCahon, The Supply Party (on artist Ludwig Becker), Chronicle of the Unsung, winner of the 2005 Montana Book Award for Biography, and The Resurrection of Philip...

Guillermo Fadanelli is an award-winning author based in Mexico City. To date he has published nine novels, seven short-story collections, and eight non-fiction works. Fadanelli’s work is highly-regarded both in  Mexico itself and by the Spanish-speaking literary...

Kate Fagan’s previous collections of poetry include The Long Moment and return to a new physics. Her poems have appeared in major anthologies including The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry and Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, and in the Weekend...

Beverley Farmer is the author of four collections of short stories, including Milk, which won the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction, and the writer’s notebook, A Body of Water. She is also the writer of the novels Alone, The Seal Woman and The House in the Light, this...

Michael Farrell’s previous collections include living at the z, ode ode (shortlisted for the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award), BREAK ME OUCH, a raiders guide (published by Giramondo in 2008), thempark and thou sand. His second collection with Giramondo open sesame...

Jane Gibian is the author of two poetry books, The Body’s Navigation (1998) and long shadows (2005). In 2002 she was awarded an Asialink Literature Residency in Hanoi. She works as a librarian and ESL...

Keri Glastonbury is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and collections. She has been the recipient of the Australia Council’s BR Whiting Residency in Rome and an Asialink Literature...

Lisa Gorton has a PhD on the poetry of John Donne from the University of Oxford. She is a poet and novelist, essayist and reviewer. Her first poetry collection Press Release won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry; her second, Hotel Hyperion was awarded the...

Pat Grant is a renowned Melbourne cartoonist, writer and zine maker, whose work has appeared in Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, and The Lifted Brow as well as in magazines such as Australia’s Surfing Life, Tracks, Beat, and 3D World. Grant is the recipient of an...

Robert Gray has published eight collections of poetry, and won every major Australian poetry prize, as well as the Patrick White Award. His poetry has been widely studied in Australian schools and universities, and published in book form in the UK, Holland, Germany...

J.S. Harry’s collections of poetry include The Life on Water and the Life Beneath, Selected Poems, which won the 1996 Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry, and Sun Shadow, Moon Shadow. Notable for its intellect and wit, her poetry speaks with cool humour, and a humane and...

Born in the UK, Kevin Hart grew up in London and Brisbane, and now lives in the USA. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Flame Tree: Selected Poems (2002). He has won both the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Awards for Poetry, and the Christopher...

John Hughes was born in Cessnock, in the Hunter Valley of NSW, and educated at the Universities of Newcastle and Cambridge, and the University of Technology, Sydney. His first book, The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays, won both the National Biography Award and...

Jess Huon is a Melbourne writer whose stories have been published in Australian literary journals. In recent years she has lived and worked between Australia and Asia, writing and teaching on retreats in monasteries throughout India. When in Melbourne she co-writes...

Antoni Jach is the author of An Erratic History, a history of Australia in poetry, and two previous novels, The Layers of the City and The Weekly Card Game, which was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Award and translated into Turkish. He is an editor,...

Nicholas Jose was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1987 to 1990, at a vital moment in China’s history, and has played an important role in artistic relations between the two countries since then. He is the author of seven highly regarded...

Mireille Juchau’s first novel Machines for Feeling was shortlisted for the 1999 Vogel/Australian Literary Award. In 2002 her play, White Gifts, won the Perishable Theatre International Women’s Playwriting Competition and was performed and published in the US. Known...

Evelyn Juers’ collective biography House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann won the 2009 Prime Minister’s Award for Non Fiction, and has been published in the US, UK, France, Spain and Italy.

Dmetri Kakmi was born in Turkey to Greek parents. His essays have been published around the globe. He compiled and edited the acclaimed children’s anthology When We Were Young, and was the co-recipient of The Peter Blazey Fellowship in 2007. He lives in Melbourne,...

Antigone Kefala has written four works of fiction, including The First Journey, The Islandand Summer Visit, and four poetry collections, The Alien, Thirsty Weather, European Notebook and Absence: New and Selected Poems as well as the non-fiction work Sydney Journals....

Sheng Keyi was born in Hunan province China in 1973 and now lives in Beijing. Death Fugue is her sixth and most recent novel, and the second, after Northern Girls, to be published in English translation. She has also written four collections of short stories. Highly...

Sara Knox was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and now lives and writes in Australia. She is the author of Murder: a Tale of Modern American Life, and teaches cultural history and creative writing at the University of Western Sydney.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is one of India’s finest English language poets, and an acclaimed translator. He is the author of five previous books of poetry and a collection of essays Partial Recall (2012), the author-translator of Songs of Kabir (2011), and the editor of...

The Sleep of a Learning Man is the sixth collection of poems by Anthony Lawrence, who has won both the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. He has also written a novel, In the Half Light, published in Australia and the UK by Picador...

Bronwyn Lea was born in Tasmania and grew up in Queensland and Papua New Guinea. Her first book, Flight Animals, won the Michel Wesley Wright Poetry Prize and the Anne Elder Award. In 2006 she was awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize for poems contained in this...

Tom Lee is a writer, researcher and educator who lecturers in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney. He is known for his articles and essays which take a philosophical interest in the landscape, technology and the different forms of sensuality....

Emma Lew is highly regarded amongst contemporary Australian poets for the dramatic intensity of her poems, which combine sudden shifts of voice and perspective with a heightened awareness of the moment. The historical range of her settings, the sense of risk and...

Jennifer Maiden’s collections have won the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Poetry Prizes, the Age Poetry Book of the Year, and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Literature, the richest literary prize in Australia.

John Mateer is a poet, writer and curator. His works – published in Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, Japan, Macau and Portugal – includes essays, books of poems, and Semar's Cave, a prose travelogue on Indonesia. For two decades he has published criticism on...

The Memory of Salt is Melbourne writer Alice Melike Ülgezer’s first book. She has lived and worked in the deserts of South Australia, and in Turkey, Syria, and Egypt as an apprentice camel handler, writer, freelance journalist and musician. She has a masters in...

Kate Middleton’s previous collections with Giramondo are Fire Season, which won the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, and Ephemeral Waters, which was shortlisted for the 2014 NSW Premier’s award for Poetry.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad is director of SWEATSHOP: Western Sydney Literacy Movement. He was Chief Editor of Westside Publications from 2005–2012. His stories have appeared in the Guardian, HEAT, Seizure, and The Lifted Brow. In 2012 Mohammed was recipient of the...

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He is the author of eleven works of fiction, including Tamarisk Row, The Plains, Inland, Barley Patch, A History of Books, A Million Windows, and Border Districts, and a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring...

Ajay Navaria is the author of two collections of short stories, Patkatha aur Anya Kahaniyan (2006) and Yes Sir (2012), and a novel, Udhar ke Log (2008). He has been associated with the premier Hindi literary journal, Hans and teaches in the Hindi department at Jamia...

Lynda Ng is an Adjunct Fellow with the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. From 2012 to 2014 she was the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in English Literature at the University of Oxford, working on a project that examined Chinese...

Zoë Norton Lodge is also a writer and presenter on The Checkout and The Chaser’s Media Circus (ABC1), creator of the hit sellout live event-cum-highly obscure TV show Story Club (ABC2) and has had her work published in Best Australian Stories. You know the kind of...

Although Louis Nowra is primarily known as a great Australian dramatist, and a screenwriter of international repute, he is also one of our most provocative essayists, tackling taboo subjects and burrowing deep into the eccentric corners of human behaviour, with the...

Suneeta Peres da Costa was born in Australia to parents of Goan origin. She has published and produced widely across the genres of fiction, non-fiction, playwriting and poetry. Her novel Homework was published by Bloomsbury in 1999. She is the recipient of numerous...

Born in Hobart, Tasmania, Sean Rabin has worked as a cook, script reader, copy-editor, freelance journalist and librarian. He has lived in Ireland, Italy, London and New York, and now resides in Sydney, Australia. His short stories have been published locally (Best...

Christopher Raja migrated to Melbourne from Kolkata in 1986, and now lives and works in Melbourne. His short story ‘After the Wreck’ was adapted for radio and broadcast on ABC Radio National in 2007. His play Drew’s Seizure was performed at Araluen Arts Centre, Alice...

Edited by Catriona Menzies-Pike and James Ley. Contributors: Ben Etherington, Jane Gleeson-White, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Evelyn Juers, Julieanne Lamond, Anthony Uhlmann, Ali Alizadeh, James Ley, Jeff Sparrow, Lisa Gorton, Emmett Stinson, Simon West, Michelle Cahill, Ivor...

Catherine Rey was born in France, and raised by grandparents who had lived in Australia. She now lives in Sydney. Her previous novel, Ce que racontait Jones, published as The Spruiker’s Tale by Giramondo in 2005, was shortlisted for both the Prix Femina and the Prix...

Aden Rolfe is a writer and editor whose practice includes poetry, performance writing and criticism. His poems have been published in the Age, Best Australian Poems, Overlandand Best Australian Poetry, and broadcast on ABC Radio National (Books and Arts Daily) and...

Gig Ryan has published six collections of poetry, including Pure and Applied, which won the 1999 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, and Heroic Money, which was shortlisted for the 2002 NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry. The recipient of writers’ fellowships and...

Oscar Schwartz is a poet and researcher based in Darwin who is concerned with the intersection between technology and culture. His poetry has been published in Best Australian Poems, the Age, Cordite and international...

Hazel Smith is a poet, performer and new media artist. She has published three volumes of poetry including The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, with accompanying CD Rom, Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii, 2008; three CDs of poetry and...

Vivian Smith is an elder statesman of Australian poetry, one of the most highly regarded poets of his generation. Born in Hobart in 1933, he has lived in Sydney since 1967. He has published eight collections of poetry as well as critical and scholarly works on...

T.G.H Strehlow had grown up with Aboriginal children on the mission, and his knowledge of Arrernte customs was unique. His descriptions of the landscape and its stories, the places of death, the outposts of white settlement; the Biblical resonances of his father’s...

Maria Takolander’s first full-length collection of poetry, Ghostly Subjects, was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award (Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award) in 2010. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Double (and...

Margaret Throsby has enjoyed a long career as a broadcaster on television and radio. She was the first woman to read ABC TV National News, and has presented numerous radio programs across all ABC networks. Currently she presents the weekday Midday Interview nationally...

Chi Vu was born in Vietnam and came to Australia in 1979. After studying at the University of Melbourne, she worked as a theatre maker, dramaturge, writer, artistic director and arts administrator. Chi Vu’s plays, which include the critically acclaimed and widely...

Corey Wakeling is the author of two earlier books of poetry, chapbook Gargantuan Terrier, Buggy or Dinghy (Vagabond Press, 2012) and full-length Goad Omen (Giramondo 2013). His poetry appears in the country’s leading journals and has been anthologized in such places...

David Walker is Professor of Australian Studies at Deakin University and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has been a visiting professor at universities in the US, China and Denmark. His books include Dream and...

Alan Wearne’s verse novels The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers and his collections The Australian Popular Songbook and Prepare the Cabin for Landing won the National Book Council Banjo Award, the NSW Premier’s Poetry Prize and Book of the Year Award, the Judith Wright...

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, political commentator, translator, and editor. His books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing and Oranges & Peanuts for Sale. His political articles are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened...

Michael Wilding is emeritus professor at the University of Sydney. He was a founding editor of the UQP’s Asian & Pacific Writing series, of the short story magazine, Tabloid Story, and co-founder of publishers Wild & Woolley, and Paperbark Press. He has also been a...

Thomas Wohlfarht and Tobias Lehmkubl are the editors of the poetry collection, Mouth to Mouth: Contemporary German Poetry in Translation. The fact that the translators are themselves poets of distinction ensures that Mouth to Mouth can be read as a testament, both to...

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Wright has published three works of non-fiction: Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land...

Ye Xin was born in Shanghai in October 1949. He was sent to Guizhou Province as a zhiqing in 1969 and worked on the construction of the Hunan-Guizhou railway. His novels include High Sierra in Miaoling, The Ages of Idling Away, Family Education, Love Has No Choice and...

Ashleigh Young works as an editor in Wellington. Her poetry and essays have been widely published in print and online journals, including Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction, Five Dials and The Griffith Review. She gained an MA in Creative Writing from the...

Fay Zwicky’s previous collection, The Gatekeeper’s Wife, won the 1998 West Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s and Adelaide Festival Awards for Poetry. In 2005 she received both the Patrick White Literary Award, and...