The Wheeler Centre Gala 2013: Where the Wild Things Are

Luka Lesson is a poet and rap artist of Greek heritage. His work engages with the history of his family homeland, the fiercely political and the vulnerably self-reflective. Luka has worked with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Akala (UK), Dr Cornel West (USA) and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Luka is a former Australian Poetry Slam Champion and has always used education based programs as a form of activism, making poetry the catalyst for social change.

Josephine Rowe was born in 1984 in Rockhampton and raised in Melbourne. Her novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice and led to her being named a 2017 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist. Her work has appeared widely in Australia and overseas, including in McSweeney’s, Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, the Paris Review Daily and Freeman’s. The winner of the 2016 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, Rowe has held fellowships with the University of Iowa, Stanford University, the Omi International Arts Center and Yaddo.

Monica Dux is a writer and commentator. She is the author of Lapsed: losing your religion is harder than it looks (HarperCollins ABC Books, 2021), Things I Didn’t Expect (when I was expecting) (MUP, 2013), co-author of ...

Alison Lester grew up on a farm by the sea, and first rode a horse as a baby in her father's arms. Her picture books mix imaginary worlds with everyday life, encouraging children to believe in themselves and celebrate the differences that make them special. Alison is involved in many community art projects and spends part of every year travelling to remote Indigenous communities, using her books to help children and adults write and draw about their own lives.

In 2012, Alison became Australia's first Children's Book Laureate, a position she shared with Boori Monty Pryor. In 2016, she was awarded the Dromkeen Medal for her outstanding achievement in the creation of Australian children's and young adult literature, and in 2018 she became the first children's book writer to win the Melbourne Prize for Literature, for her outstanding contribution to Australian literature and cultural and intellectual life. In 2019, Alison was awarded an Australia Post Legends Award and featured on a stamp, as well as being the recipient of a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2019 Australia Day Honours List.

Anthony Morgan has been working as a stand up comic since 1982. Anthony has performed his conversational stand up across Australia, as well as in London, Manchester and twice at the Edinburgh Festival.

In 1998 Anthony stunned the comedy industry and his management by announcing on stage in front of 2000 people that he was retiring. The existence of an updated biography probably means that you can whack a “semi” in front of that “retirement”.

Anthony’s conversational stand up style has taken him not only to every city in Australia, but also to London, Manchester and twice to the Edinburgh Festival. Anthony’s stand up seeks to come to grips with the simple matters of domestic, political and social life. He does this by making these matters unimaginably complex then seeking to explain them to himself and the audience members. The result is ultimately satisfying but thoroughly confusing.

Anthony is a consummate live performer and has received awards at both the Melbourne and Adelaide Fringe Festivals. He presented a show at every Melbourne Comedy Festival until his announcement in 1998 and constantly produced new live work in Melbourne and around the country.

Most people know Anthony for his television work. This started in 1991 as a regular on The Big Gig (ABC) and spots on Hey, Hey It’s Saturday and Tonight Live. In 1994 Anthony became the Melbourne correspondent for Denton (Seven Network). This more than anything else brought Anthony to the public’s attention. Anthony’s regular crosses saw him boxing against world champions, proclaiming his love to Kylie Minogue and getting a tattoo of Lenny Bruce on his back. Anthony also appeared on the Melbourne Comedy Festival debates shown on both the ABC and the Seven Network in 1994, 1995 & 1997. More recently, he’s appeared on the ABC’s Spicks & Specks, as well as on Statesmen of Comedy on The Comedy Channel.

In the 1996 Melbourne Comedy Festival Anthony produced Ink, Pink, You Stink, selling out the Melbourne Town Hall three times over. In 1997 more fans again flocked to see Anthony with his five piece band, Ron.

Post-retirement, he returned in 2000, initially popping up at venues around Melbourne and reprising his 1994 Melbourne Comedy Festival hit, Morgan’s Bar and Grill at the Comedy Festival. Later that year, Anthony launched his first new show since “retirement”; Bag Of Nails at the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Anthony followed up with the seething and dangerous self-titled Anthony Morgan in the next year’s Melbourne Comedy Festival. After helping to close the Prince Patrick Hotel in January 2003, Morgan was up for a quiet drink and a fortnight of good old fashioned pub shows at Bar Open in August.

In 2006 he returned to the Melbourne Comedy Festival, travelling from his new home in Tasmania, and again the following two years with the shows Sackful of Bullfrogs and Unrepentant.

David Marr is the author of Patrick White: A Life, Panic, The High Price of Heaven and Dark Victory (with Marian Wilkinson). He has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Saturday Paper, the Guardian and the Monthly, and been editor of the National Times, a reporter for Four Corners and presenter of ABC TV’s Media Watch.

He is the author of five bestselling Quarterly Essays in addition to the latest, Quarterly Essay 65, The White Queen: One Nation and the Politics of Race.

Hannie Rayson is a playwright and screenwriter best known for Hotel Sorrento.

Hannie Rayson has established a reputation for topical, complex dramas written with wit and insight. A graduate of Melbourne University and the Victorian College of the Arts, she has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from La Trobe University.

Her plays have been extensively performed around Australia and internationally. They include Mary, Room to Move, Hotel Sorrento, Falling From Grace, Scenes from a Separation (co-written with Andrew Bovell), Competitive Tenderness, Life After George, Inheritance, Two Brothers, The Glass Soldier and The Swimming Club. She has been awarded two Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, four Helpmann Awards, two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award as well as the Age Performing Arts Award and The Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award.

For television she has written Sloth (ABC, Seven Deadly Sins) and co-written two episodes of SeaChange. A feature film of Hotel Sorrento, produced in 1995, was nominated for ten Australian Film Institute Awards. In 1999 she received the Magazine Publishers' Society of Australia’s Columnist of the Year Award for her regular contributions to HQ magazine.

Hannie made playwriting history when Life After George was the first play to be nominated for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 and 2009 she was nominated for the Melbourne Prize for Literature, a prize for a Victoria-based writer whose body of published or produced work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life.

She has recently completed a commission for the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. Her new play is called Extinction.

Clare Bowditch is an ARIA Award winning musician, broadcaster, sometimes actor, speaker, entrepreneur, and author whose first book “Your Own Kind Of Girl” won the ABIA for “New Writer of The Year” and has been named ...

Robyn Davidson was born on a cattle property in Queensland. She moved to Sydney in the late Sixties, returning to study in Brisbane before going to Alice Springs to prepare for her journey across the Australian desert ...

Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate. His works include Scraps of Heaven, Violin Lessons, The Fighter, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, and his most recent work The Watermill. Zable lives in Melbourne.

Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man born in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond. He’s the author of the best-selling Dark Emu, Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, Loving Country: A Guide to Sacred Australia ...