Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Lili Wilkinson is the award-winning author of eighteen books for young people, including The Erasure Initiative and After the Lights Go Out. Lili has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, and is a passionate advocate for YA and the young people who read it, establishing the Inky Awards at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria. Her latest book is A Hunger of Thorns.

Ailsa Piper has worked throughout Australia as a playwright, theatre director, actor, teacher, speaker and pate-wrapper.

Her first love was the theatre, which took her from Western Australia, where she grew up on a sheep station in the Gascoyne area, to Sydney and on to Melbourne. Her love affair with the city continues after over two decades.

Ailsa was co-winner of the inaugural Patrick White Playwright’s Award for her script Small Mercies, and a three-year resident actor in Neighbours’ Ramsay Street. She has been nominated for Green Room Awards for acting and directing in the theatre, and in July 2012, John Bell directed a production of an adaptation of Duchess of Malfi, which she co-wrote. She has been a board member at the Arts Centre, Playbox and numerous other arts organisations.

She is passionate about walking and language, and her first book, Sinning Across Spain, reflects those passions.