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​2020 WRITERS

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Paul Carter
Paul Carter writes, draws, co-designs places. Coming from the UK, via Spain and Italy, he derives his material from
‘the migrant condition.’ In books like
The Road to Botany Bay, The Lie of the Land and Meeting Place he has proposed new forms of cross-cultural communication.
He believes that the way we name and describe the world
is ethical: poetics is politics. He has written extensively about the Mallee (
Ground Truthing, 2010) but also has deep links to memory sites in Berlin and Venice. His poems (Ecstacies and Elegies) explore the relationship between the plenitude of existence and the suffering of loss. His creative practice, Material Thinking, is named for a book published in 2004: it has produced a number of well-known projects including Nearamnew at Federation Square. He is also professor of design at RMIT University.
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Ali Cobby Eckermann
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Ali Cobby Eckermann’s first collection little bit long time was written in the desert and launched her literary career in 2009.
In 2013 Ali toured Ireland as Australian Poetry Ambassador and won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and Book Of The Year (NSW) for
Ruby Moonlight, a massacre verse novel. In 2014 Ali was the inaugural recipient of the Tungkunungka Pintyanthi Fellowship at Adelaide Writers Week, and the first Aboriginal Australian writer to attend the International Writing Program at University of Iowa. In 2017 Ali received a Windham Campbell Award for Poetry from Yale University USA and was awarded a Literature Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts in 2018. Ali was granted a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy in 2019, and is currently an Adjunct Professor at RMIT Melbourne.
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(Image credit: Anette Willis)
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Peter Goldsworthy
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Peter Goldsworthy combines writing with the practice of medicine. He has won literary awards across a range of genres, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction, and, together with composer Richard Mills, the inaugural Helpmann Award for Best New Work for the opera Batavia.  His most recent novel is Minotaur, published by Penguin Viking in 2019; his 1995 novel Wish has been reissued in the Text Classics series, his 1998 novel Maestro as an Angus & Robertson Australian Classic. His novels have been widely translated and most have been adapted for the stage.
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Barry Hill    
​Barry Hill has won Premier’s Awards for poetry, non-fiction and the essay. His most recent book is Reason and Lovelessness; Essays, Encounters, Reviews 1980– 2017, which derives from his major works, including Broken Song and Peacemongers. His poetic works include major studies of William Buckley and the celebrated English painter, Lucian Freud, which was shortlisted for the UK’s Forward Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologised. His selected poems, Eagerly We Burn, has recently been released by Shearsman Books in the UK. His new book of poems
is Kind Fire. He lives in Queenscliff with his wife, the singer-songwriter Rose Bygrave. He is the current
​judge of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal Award.
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Charlotte Guest
Charlotte Guest is a bookseller and
PhD candidate in creative writing at Deakin University, Geelong. Her debut poetry collection,
Soap, was published
by Recent Work Press in 2017. She is currently working on her first novel.









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Katie Holmes
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Katie Holmes is an historian who writes on environment, memory, women’s letter and diaries, and gardens. She is the author of Spaces in Her Day: Australian Women’s Diaries of the 1920 & 1930s (1995) and Between the Leaves: Australian Stories of Women, Writing and Gardens (2011), and most recently co-author of Mallee Country: Land, People, History (Monash Uni Publishing, 2020). She is also Director of the La Trobe University’s Centre for the Study of the Inland and has an abiding interest in the history of Australian settlement.
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Paul Kane
Paul Kane is a poet, critic, and scholar. He has published seven collections of poems and a dozen other books, most recently Welcome Light (2016) Renga: 100 Poems (with John Kinsella, 2017), and A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina (2018). His work appears in the US, Australia, and the UK, and has been translated into French, Italian and Chinese.
He has received several awards, including a Fulbright, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, as well as an honorary doctorate from La Trobe University. He is poetry editor for
Antipodes, artistic director for the Mildura Writers Festival, and general editor of The Braziller Series of Australian Poets. He teaches at Vassar College, and divides his time between homes in Warwick, NY, and rural Victoria.
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Christos Tsiolkas
Christos Tsiolkas is the author of six novels including
the international bestseller
The Slap and most recently Barracuda, shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and the
inaugural Voss Literary Prize.
The Slap and Barracuda were
both adapted into celebrated television series. He is also a playwright, essayist and screenwriter. He lives in Melbourne.

Image credit: Zoe Ali
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​John Wolseley
Since migrating to Australia in 1976, John Wolseley has been on a search to discover how we dwell and move within landscape.
He sees himself as a hybrid mix of artist and scientist; one who tries to relate the minutiae of the natural world to the abstract dimensions of the earth’s dynamic systems. Since 2009, Wolseley has worked and exhibited with the great Yolngu artist Mulkun Wirrpanda painting the floodplains and flora of the Blue Mud Bay region of Arnhem Land. His work has been exhibited widely across Australia, is in many public collections and featured in numerous publications including John Wolseley: Land Marks by Sasha Grishin, Lines for Birds, John Wolseley and Barry Hill and most recently Midawarr/Harvest, The art of Mulkun Wirrpanda and
​John Wolseley.
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Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye, Palestinian-American, is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States (Poetry Foundation). For
2019-2020 she was the poetry editor of the New York Times Sunday magazine. Selected for Lifetime Achievement Awards
​by the National Book Critics Circle and the Texas Institute of Letters in both 2019 and 2020, she has conducted writing workshops all over the world and published more than 35 books. She lives with her husband, documentarian/photographer Michael Nye, in San Antonio, Texas. They have one son and one grandson.

Image Credit: Ha Lam
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Maria Tumarkin
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Maria Tumarkin writes books, essays, reviews, and pieces for performance and radio; she collaborates with sound and visual artists and has had her work carved into dockside tiles. She is the author of four books of ideas. The latest, Axiomatic (Brow Books), won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and The National Book Critics Circle Award (USA). Maria holds a PhD in cultural history and teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne.
A selection of guest writers since 1994 
Celeste Abad-Jugo
Alexis Abola
Robert Adamson
Jordie Albiston
Jeffrey Alexander
Stephanie Alexander
Louise Allan
Chris Andrews
Emilie Zoey Baker
Benjamin Barney 
Peter Beilharz
Judith Beveridge
Tony Birch
Carmel Bird
Judith Bishop
Pamela Bone
Nic Brasch
Judith Brett
Rofel Brion
Michelle Cah ill
Paul Carter
Gary Catalano
Eileen Chong
Mark Cladis
Inga Clendinnen
JM Coetzee 
Alfredo Conde
Kerry Conway
Alison Croggon
Sophie Cunningham
Robyn Davidson
Luke Davies
Bruce Dawe
Sarah Day
Richard Denniss
Robert Dessaix
Joe Dolce
Will Eaves
Stephen Edgar
Bob Ellis
Matthew Evans
Diane Fahey
Tracy Farr
Janine Fraser
Morag Fraser
Alan Frost
Raimond Gaita
Helen Garner
Moreno Giovannoni
Andrea Goldsmith
Anna Goldsworthy
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Peter Goldsworthy
​​​​​Lisa Gorton



Alan Gould
Jamie Grant
Robert Gray
James Griffin
Gideon Haigh
Marion Halligan
Sonja Hartnett
Per Henningsgard
Barry Hill
Jane Hirshfield
Philip Hodgins
Trevor Hogan
Lucy Holt
Chloe Hooper
Coral Hull
Ivor Indyk
Clive James
Daniel James
Lisa Jacobson
Linda Jaivan
Kate Jennings
Gail Jones
Nicholas Jose
Evelyn Juers
Chet Kane
Paul Kane
Tina Kane
Thomas Keneally   
Cate Kennedy
Ihab Hassan
Jamie King Holden
Graeme Kinross-Smith
Christopher Koch  
Amitava Kumar
Anthony Lawrence
Geoff Lawrence
Bronwyn Lea
Michelle Leggott  
Geoffrey Lehmann
James Ley
Bella Li
Olga Lorenzo
Kim Mahood
Shane Maloney
David Malouf  
David Marr
Ian McBryde
David McCooey
Meme McDonald
Rhyll McMaster
Michael Meehan
Angela Meyer
​Kate Middleton





Alex Miller 
Drusilla Modjeska
Liz Moore 
Frank Moorhouse  
Marie Munkara
Les Murray
Patrice Newell
Peter Newman
Dennis Nicholson
Mark O’Connor
Sharon Olds
Jan Owen
Jillian Pattinson
Geoff Page
Tim Parks
Bruce Pascoe
AS Patric
Elliot Perlman
Dorothy Porter
Peter Porter
Boori Prior
Sian Prior
Alice Pung
Peter Robb
Peter Rose
Nicolas Rothwell
Mary Jo Salter
Stephen Sartarelli
George Seddon
Ronald Sharp
Janet Shaw
Craig Sherborne
Alex Skovron
Jane Smiley
Bernard Smith
Peter Steele
Sian Supski  
Maria Takolander
Christina Thompson
Carrie Tiffany
Peter Vale 
Ellen Van Neerven
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Clinton Walker
David Walker
Don Watson
Ian Wedde
Simon West
Petra White
Terri-Ann White 
Tim Winton  
John Wolseley
Alexis Wright  

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  • Home
  • WRITERS
  • PROGRAM
  • AWARDS
    • PHILIP HODGINS MEMORIAL MEDAL
    • TINA KANE EMERGENT WRITER
  • GALLERY
  • SPONSORS & PATRONS
  • Contact