Breath by Tim Winton

Mic Looby is a Melbourne-based muser. He is also a writer and editor for The Age, a columnist for The Big Issue magazine and author of the satirical travel novel Paradise Updated.

Mic Looby was born in Windsor, NSW, in 1969. He studied journalism in Melbourne and spent several years as a Hong Kong-based illustrator and travel writer.

He also worked for many years as an editor and author for Lonely Planet Publications, contributing to many guidebooks to South-east Asia and Australia.

He is a regular columnist for The Big Issue magazine and has illustrated five children’s books. His work appears regularly in The Australian, The Age and the Herald Sun.

He lives in Melbourne and his first novel, Paradise Updated, was published in 2009. It was described by Patrick McCaughey in Australian Book Review as the “best rookie novel of the year - like early Waugh: comic with a sense of threat.”

Photograph: James Braund

Kate Holden is the author of the memoirs In My Skin: A memoir and The Romantic: Italian nights and days. She wrote a long-running column for the Age and has published features, reviews, essays and short stories in all the major Australian journals and newspapers. 

Kate is a frequent contributor to the Saturday Paper and Australian Book Review. A new book, The Winter Road, will be published in 2019 by Black Ink.

Judy Horacek is a freelance cartoonist, illustrator and writer. Her work has appeared in the Age, the Australian and the Canberra Times, and her pointy noised characters can be found on fridges and toilet doors all over the world.

Eight collections of her cartoons have been published. Random Life will be her ninth. Judy also creates children’s picture books – both on her own and in collaboration with Mem Fox. Together, Mem and Judy created the bestselling Where is the Green Sheep? an instant children’s classic. Last year, they released their fourth book together, Ducks Away.

Her cartoons often reflect her interests in feminism, the environment and social justice, and also quite often her interest in funny for funny’s sake. 

She is currently published twice weekly in the Age, and has various other gigs and commissions as well. Major retrospective exhibitions of her cartoons have been held at the National Museum of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. She has been twice nominated for Walkley Awards for Cartoonist of the Year.

She has a range of greeting cards featuring her cartoons and she also regularly exhibits her limited edition prints and watercolours.

Alan Brough was born in New Zealand and is quite a bit older than he'd like to be. Alan has always loved books and, from an early age, wanted to be a writer. Then he and his Dad went to see Star Wars and Alan decided that, actually, he really, really, really, really, really wanted to be an actor.

After having been an actor for a while Alan realised there wasn't that much work for a 6'4" guy with a slightly lopsided face and thick curly hair so he tried his hand at directing, broadcasting, composing, dancing (true!), singing and, in an unexpected turn of events, being a professional music nerd.

Recently, he got around to being a writer.

One day he hopes to have a bio that includes phrases like 'bestselling', 'award-winning' and 'so successful that he recently bought a solid gold toilet' but, until then, he's just happy to look at his copy of Charlie and the War Against the Grannies and think: 'Cool! I wrote a book!'