The Next Big Thing: Regional Edition

Honey Brown lives in country Victoria, Australia, with her husband and two children. She began writing in 2000 and is the author of six critically acclaimed novels. Her first novel Red Queen was published to critical acclaim in 2009 and won an Aurealis Award, and The Good Daughter was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award in 2011.

Active and a keen bushwalker, a life-changing blow came for Honey in her late-twenties when she was involved in a farm accident. The resulting spinal injury left her confined to a wheelchair. Honey turned to writing as a way back from the trauma and the depression that followed.   

Candid about the tough road back from acquiring a disability, Honey now focuses her energy on writing, traveling with her family and engaging in the promotional side of being a popular novelist.

Eliza Henry-Jones is the author of In the Quiet and Ache. Her latest novel, P is for Pearl, is her first for young adults.

Eliza worked for years with high-risk children and families in the drug and alcohol sector and has qualifications in English, psychology and grief, loss and trauma counselling. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Guardian, the Age, Daily Life and the Big Issue, among other places. She lives on a small farm in the Yarra Valley.

Charles Hall is the author of the novel Summer’s Gone. He played guitar in a band that had a top-5 hit record in Perth in the late sixties and spent the nineties as guitarist and songwriter for an independent alt-country band in Melbourne.

Georgia Robinson is a first year creative writing student who grew up on the border of country and suburban Victoria and began writing poetry at a young age. She intends to soon begin a novel while completing her degree.