2025 Special Guests
Michael Winkler
Michael Winkler is an Australian writer of fiction and non-fiction, living in Melbourne on unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. His novel Grimmish was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the first self-published novel to make the long- or shortlist. It was subsequently published by Puncher & Wattmann (Australia), Peninsula Press (United Kingdom), Coach House Books (North America) and Mutatis Mutandis (Spanish translation – Spain). His next novel, Griefdogg, is due for publication by Text Publishing in early 2026. He won the 2016 Calibre Prize for his essay ‘The Great Red Whale’ about Uluru, relationships between First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians, mental illness and Moby Dick. He has self-published two non-fiction titles, and written books for commercial publishers including Penguin, Hardie Grant and Melbourne University Press. His journalism, short fiction, reviews and essays have been widely published and anthologised.  ​
Melinda Hinkson
Melinda Hinkson is an independent writer and social researcher with wide ranging interests in people-place relationships. As an anthropologist she has worked extensively with Warlpiri people of the Central Desert and since 2022 with farmers and fruit growers of the Millewa-Mallee region of north-western Victoria. She is author of See How We Roll: Enduring Exile Between Desert and Urban Australia (Duke University Press, 2021) and Remembering the Future: Warlpiri Life Through the Prism of Drawing (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2025). She has edited books on the life work of anthropologist WEH Stanner, the Northern Territory Intervention, and identity in the digital age. For two decades Melinda taught and researched anthropology and visual culture at the Australian National University (2001-15) and Deakin University (2015-22). From 2014 to 2020 she was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She directed the Institute of Postcolonial Studies between 2019 and 2023. Melinda is currently an adjunct associate professor with the Climate Change Adaptation Lab, La Trobe University, and lives on a farm in the Millewa. 
Nikita Vanderbyl 
Nikita Vanderbyl is a researcher of art and colonialism and a recent local to Sunraysia. Her research has focused on the paintings and drawings of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung artist William Barak as well as the legacies of British slavery and its connections to colonisation of South Australia. Her writing has been published in The Conversation, in the La Trobe Journal, Aboriginal History, History Workshop Journal and Australian Historical Studies. When she isn’t researching Australia’s past, Nikita explores Paarkantji Country and local history on her doorstep in Wentworth. She also writes an irregular newsletter of art criticism and reviews called Slow Looking: 
https://nikitavanderbyl.substack.com/.
Peter Goldsworthy
Peter Goldsworthy grew up in various Australian country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin. After graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1974, he worked for many years in alcohol and drug rehabilitation. Since then, he has divided his time equally between writing and general practice. He has won major literary awards across a range of genres: poetry, short story, the novel, in opera, and most recently in theatre. His memoir of childhood, His Stupid Boyhood  (Penguin Hamish Hamilton), was published in  2013.  His most recent book is a ‘cancer memoir’:  The Cancer Finishing School (2024, Penguin Viking). His novels have sold over 400,000 copies in Australia alone and have been translated into many European and Asian languages; Three Dog Night, won the FAW Christina Stead Award; in 2003 his first novel Maestro was voted by members of the Australian Society of Authors one of the Top 40 Australian books of all time.
Evelyn Juers
Evelyn Juers wrote her doctorate on the biographies of the Brontës. A biographer, essayist and critic, she has contributed to major Australian and international publications. Her collective biography House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann won the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction. It was published in the US, UK, France, Spain and Italy. Her biography of Eliza Donnithorne, The Recluse, was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and the Magarey Medal for Biography. Her latest book is The Dancer: A Biography for Philippa Cullen.
Paul Carter
Paul Carter is a UK-born writer and artist resident in Australia. Since the publication of The Road to Botany Bay (1987) he has gained an international reputation for his reinterpretation of colonial dynamics in a postcolonising context. Much of his work focuses on Indigenous/ non-Indigenous faultlines reflected in topics as diverse as ontologies of placemaking, constructions of identity and the conditions of renegotiated meeting and exchange. Paul is a noted sound artist and public artist whose work explores the complex modalities of communication in multicultural polities. His public art is visible at Federation Square (Melbourne), Yagan Square (Perth) and Olympic Park (Sydney). His writing for radio was recently edited and released by Performance Research Publications (UK) under the title Absolute Rhythm. Recent publications of particular relevance to the Cultural leadership Dialogue are: Translations, an autoethnography: migration, colonial Australia and the creative encounter (Manchester UP, 2021) and Decolonising Governance: archipelagic thinking (Routledge, 2019).