Beyond the Couplet

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.

Craig Sherborne is an acclaimed memoirist, novelist, poet and playwright, best known for Hoi Polloi, Muck and The Amateur Science of Love.

Craig is the Sydney-born son of Kiwi publicans. They pursued horseracing for a lifestyle and raised him as a racecourse brat. He was transfixed by the seedy glamorousness of that milieu and people’s general avoidance of earning an honest day’s living, an attitude that, as an adult, he adapted to his own patchy career as a journalist.

He began writing in his early teens for the companionship of the page, and out of a dreamy affection for artful language, but it wasn’t until the ABC produced two of his radio plays in the early 1990s, and awarded him a drama prize, that he began to write seriously.

His poems and essays have since appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies, including Black Inc.’s Best Australian Essays and Best Australian Poems.

His memoir, Hoi Polloi, was published by Black Inc to critical acclaim in 2005. It was shortlisted for the Victorian and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards and selected for the Australia Council’s Books Alive program. Muck, the sequel to Hoi Polloi, was published in 2007 and won the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Both books were published internationally.

His novel, The Amateur Science of Love was published by Text in 2011, shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction, and won the triennial Melbourne Prize for Writing in 2012. He has a new novel coming out with Text next year.