On Five. A Gala Night of Storytelling.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, the award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the poetry collections Carrying The World and How Decent Folk Behave, and many other books for adults and children. Her forthcoming poetry collection is It’s The S... Read more

William McInnes is one of Australia’s most popular writers, delighting readers with his memoirs A Man’s Got to have a Hobby and That’d be Right, his novels Cricket Kings and The Laughing Clowns, and his insight into Australian life since the 1940s, written with Essential Media and Entertainmen... Read more

Anita Heiss is the author of non-fiction, historical fiction, commercial women’s fiction, poetry, social commentary and travel articles. She is a Lifetime Ambassador of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and a proud member of the Wiradjuri nation of central NSW. Anita was a finalist in the 20... Read more

Les Murray is Australia’s leading poet. In 2015, his first new collection of poems in five years will be published, Waiting for the Past. Bunyah will follow later in the year, a collection that brings together the poems Murray has written about the place where he comes from and by extension about ... Read more

Michael Leunig has been drawing and writing for Australian newspapers since 1965. He was born in Melbourne and now lives on a farm in north-eastern Victoria. His work has been widely published overseas and has been adapted in Australia for television, theatre and radio. Leunig’s many books include... Read more

Robert Dessaix is a writer, translator, broadcaster and occasional essayist. From 1985 to 1995, after teaching Russian language and literature for many years at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales, he presented the weekly Books and Writing program on ABC Radio Na... Read more

Eddie Perfect is one of Australia’s most diverse, respected and prolific writer/composer/performers. At the age of 37, he has already made his mark in the fields of comedy, music theatre composition and book-writing, playwrighting, screenwriting, classical music, jazz and acting for stage and scre... Read more

Mark Colvin is an Australian journalist, filmmaker and broadcaster. He has been the presenter of PM, one of the flagship Australian radio current affairs programs on the ABC Radio network, since 1997. As a foreign correspondent, Mark covered such major stories as the American hostage crisi... Read more

Stephanie Alexander AO is regarded as one of Australia’s great food educators. Her reputation has been earned through her thirty years as an owner-chef in several restaurants, as the author of 14 influential books and hundreds of articles about food matters, and for her groundbreaking wor... Read more

Best known for her books Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne and A City Lost and Found: Whelan the Wrecker’s Melbourne, Robyn Annear is also the author of an unpublishable novel set in the city in 1893.

Tim Flannery is a scientist, an explorer, a conservationist and a leading writer on climate change. He has held various academic positions including visiting Professor in Evolutionary and Organismic Biology at Harvard University, Director of the South Australian Museum, Principal Research Scientist ... Read more

Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh (South East Queensland) and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Lit... Read more