Debut Mondays

Melanie Joosten is a social worker and researcher, and the author of A Long Time Coming: Essays on Old Age. She works as a policy officer at the elder abuse service Seniors Rights Victoria. She is the author of the novels Gravity Well and Berlin Syndrome, and has been named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist. 

Raphael’s debut novel I Am Max Lamm will be published in June 2011 by UQP.

Raphael Brous was born in Melbourne in 1982. He has studied law, neuroscience and immunology at Monash University. He writes and plays music in two bands and is a volunteer campaign director at the animal rights organisation Animal Liberation. He occasionally debates animal rights and religion with John Safran on Triple J radio. Presently based in Melbourne, he has lived in London and Brooklyn. His recreation consists of skateboarding and obsessively reading.

Eli Glasman is a Melbourne-based author. His debut novel, The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew (Sleepers Publishing), concerns a homosexual boy in the Melbourne orthodox Jewish community.

His short fiction has appeared in Voiceworks and Sleepers Almanac and in 2013 he was placed second in the Josephine Ulrick short story competition.

Dan Disney grew up in East Gippsland. He has worked in paddocks, warehouses, psychiatric institutions and universities, and divides his time between Cuneo, Melbourne, and Seoul, where he currently lectures in 20th century poetries at Sogang University. Further details can be found on www.dandisney.com

Alongside poems, Dan Disney’s great love is wandering, which often leads to places of sublime strangeness – the docks of Casablanca, where he felt like a morsel in a lair; drinking ‘til sunrise with the king of wind-bitten, north-western Irish island; collectively seasick with 300 Russian pilgrims on their way across the White Sea. He once had lunch in William Wordsworth’s old room at Cambridge; he once was called a prick by a somewhat famous Hollywood director.

He was arrested in Prague when it was the capital of Czechoslovakia, and interrogated by border guards in Turkey, Belarus and Laos. He has stood at the foot of Immanuel Kant’s statue and watched an undercover drug bust, and sat on the doorstep of Martin Heidegger’s Black Forest hutte in the rain. He feels comforted to know the world is big enough to contain more wonders than he’ll ever wonder at, more poems than he’ll ever be able to poem.