A Gala Night of Storytelling

John Safran is a Melbourne writer and filmmaker. His recent book Puff Piece, exploring Big Tobacco and vaping, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, his debut Murder in Mississippi won the Ned Kelly ...

Paul Kelly was born in Adelaide, one of nine children, in 1955. He wrote his first song in 1976 and has been making records since 1978, over thirty to date. He has collaborated with many other songwriters and written music for film and theatre. His prose has appeared in Meanjin, The Monthly, Rolling Stone and the Age, and in 2010 he published a ‘mongrel memoir’, How to Make Gravy. Love is Strong as Death: Poems chosen by Paul Kelly was published in 2019. His most recent albums are 2019’s Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds and 2020's Please Leave Your Light On, with Paul Grabowsky.

Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (2008) won the Victorian, New South Wales, West Australian and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, as well as the John Button Prize for Political Writing, and a Ned Kelly Award for crime writing. Her latest book is The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire (2018). She is also the author of two novels, A Child’s Book of True Crime and The Engagement.

John Marsden has written more than 40 books, mostly for teenagers and children, including Tomorrow When the War Began, So Much to Tell You, and Letters from the Inside. He has sold over five million books worldwide, and has won every major award in Australia for young people's fiction. South of Darkness, written for adults, won the Christina Stead Award for Best Novel of 2015. John's passionate interest in education led him to start two schools, Candlebark, on a vast forested estate near Romsey Victoria, and Alice Miller, at Macedon, a Year 7-12 school with a particular emphasis on the creative arts. The two schools enrol 380 students in 2019.

Judith Lucy is one of Australia’s most popular comedians. A best-selling author, her work in radio, television and film and her sell-out national live tours have made her a household name.

A standup comedian for over 20 years, she sprang to national prominence in 1993 when she joined the cast of ABC TV’s The Late Show. Her television appearances since then have been many and varied. ABC TV’s current season of Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey represents her first solo TV project.

On radio, she was a presenter on Triple J and was a regular on the legendary Martin Molloy program. In 2004 she was announced as co-host of the 2DAY-FM breakfast show in Sydney, and was famously sacked the following year, which became the subject of one of her most successful live touring shows, I Failed.

Her live stage shows, filled with sharply observed and painfully funny, honest personal monologues, have a huge and devoted following. In addition to her appearances at comedy festivals in Edinburgh and Montreal, she regularly sells out theatres in Australia’s capital cities and regional centres, from her 1995 hit, King of the Road, through to her most recent solo show, Judith Lucy’s Not Getting Any Younger. She was also one of the award-winning trio behind Comedy Is Not Pretty and Comedy Is Still Not Pretty, with Denise Scott and Lynda Gibson.

In feature films, she has appeared alongside Mick Molloy and Bill Hunter in both Crackerjack and Bad Eggs, written and directed by her old Late Show buddy Tony Martin and also featuring Bob Franklin, Shaun Micallef, Robyn Nevin and Alan Brough.

As a writer, Judith has contributed features and columns to publications including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Madison magazine, but it was her 2008 memoir, The Lucy Family Alphabet, which established her as an author. The book, which recounted life with her much-loved but nutty Irish parents and her discovery, at age 25, that she was adopted, was a roaring success, garnered rave reviews and was reprinted several times.

David Malouf is the author of short story collections The Complete Stories (winner of the Australia Asia Literary Award), Dream Stuff and Every Move You Make, and of acclaimed novels including The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ and Miles Franklin Prizes) and Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award).

His most recent work Ransom was shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award and the Qld Premier’s Literary Award.

He also writes poetry, drama and libretti for operas. Born and brought up in Brisbane, Malouf lives in Sydney.

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 ...

Alex Miller is one of Australia’s best loved writers. He is twice winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s premier literary prize, the first occasion in 1993 for The Ancestor Game, and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country.

Conditions of Faith, his fifth novel, was published in 2000 and won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the 2001 NSW Premiers Literary Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin IMPAC International Literature Award, shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award in 2000, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Miles Franklin Award in 2001.

He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, for The Ancestor Game, in 1993.

Miller’s seventh novel, Prochownik’s Dream, was published in 2005.

In 2009, Alex Miller was named as a finalist for the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature and his most recent novel, Lovesong, was published in November 2009 to great critical acclaim.

Born in Hamilton in western Victoria in 1953, Shane Maloney is one of Australia’s most popular novelists. His award-winning and much-loved Murray Whelan series – Stiff, The Brush-Off, Nice Try, The Big Ask, Something Fishy and Sucked In – has been published around the world. 

In 1996, The Brush-Off won the Ned Kelly Prize for Crime Fiction. In 2004, Stiff and The Brush-Off were made into telemovies starring David Wenham as Murray Whelan. In 2009, Shane Maloney was presented with the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia Lifetime Achievement Award.

Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely.

Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and is currently a text on the VCE Literature syllabus.

She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2011. Her most recent book is her second collection of stories, Like a House on Fire (Scribe, 2012), which won the Queensland Literary Award and was shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize, and is also on the Victorian school syllabus, as a Year 12 English text. 

She lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, with her daughter, and is working on a new novel.