Helen Garner
Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She worked first as a high school teacher, then for many years as a freelance journalist. Her first book, Monkey Grip, appeared in 1977. She is known for her novels, short stories, essays, and works of non-fiction. Her most recent books are The Season, which she calls ‘a nanna’s book about footy’, and The Mushroom Tapes, co-authored with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. This year her collected diaries, How to End a Story, won the Baillie Gifford Non-Fiction Prize in the UK.
Professor Jenny Hocking
Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking AM FASSA is an award-winning biographer and the inaugural Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University. Her books include the acclaimed two-volume biography of Gough Whitlam, shortlisted for numerous literary awards and winner of the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Barbara Ramsden Award. Her latest book is The Palace Letters: The Queen, the Governor-General, and the Plot to Dismiss Gough Whitlam. An ABC TV documentary based on her book, The Search for the Palace Letters, screened in 2024 and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Awards for History.
Tony Birch
Tony Birch was born in 1957, and raised in the strong Aboriginal community in Fitzroy, Melbourne. His ancestry is diverse and includes Aboriginal, Afghan and Barbadian convict history. He is the author of four novels including Women & Children, winner of the 2024 The Age Fiction Book of the year and The White Girl, shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award. A self-described delinquent in his youth, he is currently the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne and one of our greatest living writers.
Murray Middleton
Before he was a published writer, Murray Middleton worked at Wayward Books in Kensington, occasionally accepting boxes of Helen Garner's secondhand paperbacks. He has won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, The Age Short Story Award and been named Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist. He is the author of the short story collections When There's Nowhere Else to Run and U Want It Darker, and the novel No Church in the Wild, which is set in Flemington and Kensington.
Katherine Brabon
Katherine Brabon is the award-winning author of the novels The Memory Artist, The Shut Ins, Body Friend and Cure. Her work has received the Vogel’s Literary Award, a NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the David Harold Tribe Fiction Award. Her third novel, Body Friend, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the ALS Gold Medal.
Laura McPhee Browne
Laura McPhee-Browne is a writer, social worker, and counsellor living in Melbourne on Wurundjeri land. Her short stories have been published widely in Australia. Her first two novels, Cherry Beach (2020) and Little Plum (2023), were published with Text Publishing to critical acclaim. Her third novel, Worry Doll, will be published in July 2026, with Scribe, Scribe UK and Book of the Month in North America.
Dr James Bradley
James is a senior lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne, where he teaches ‘Genetics, Biopower and History’ and ‘Minds and Madness’. Over the course of his career, he has researched and written about an eclectic range of things, including cricket, tattooing, medical professionalisation, alternative medicine and convict transportation to Australia. He is currently writing about the 'piratical bushrangers', two escaped convicts who played havoc in Victoria in late 1853 and is engaged, as well, in a larger project looking at scar patterns amongst transported convicts.
Joel Townsend
Joel Townsend is Director of Monash Law Clinics, a community legal centre associated with the university's Faculty of Law. Prior to this, he worked for nearly 15 years at Victoria Legal Aid. He is an Accredited Specialist in Administrative Law, and is co-Chair of the Law Institute's Administrative Law Advisory Committee. Joel has a long history of contributing to community legal sector organisations. He is a former Chair of the Flemington Kensington Community Legal Centre and a former Board member at Inner Melbourne Community Legal. His podcast 'In That Case', examines some of Australia's most impactful and interesting pieces of public interest litigation.
Katherine Sheedy
Katherine Sheedy is a professional historian and a director of Way Back When Consulting Historians. Katherine creates histories that are accessible and engaging for a range of audiences. She is an experienced writer, editor, heritage practitioner and oral historian with involvement in a wide variety of community history projects. Her work includes commissioned histories, heritage research and exhibition interpretation. Katherine is the author of histories on businesses, education institutions, medical bodies and community groups.
Sam Elkin
Sam Elkin is a writer, radio-maker and community lawyer. His debut book is Detachable Penis: A Queer Legal Saga, which was published in 2024 and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Humour Writing and the National Biography Prize in 2025. He is also the co-editor of the anthology Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia. His essays have been published in Griffith Review, Australian Book Review and Sydney Review of Books and he co-hosts the 3RRR radio show Queer View Mirror.
Najma Sambul
Najma Sambul is a Melbourne-based journalist and writer working across news and creative storytelling. She was a staff reporter at the ABC and The Age, and her previous bylines include Agence France-Presse, The Guardian Australia and HuffPost Australia. She has covered major political moments, complex social issues and community-led stories with a human-centred lens. Alongside her journalism, Najma produces Somali arts and community storytelling through the East African Women’s Foundation, blending narrative, performance and cultural expression.
Mo Sudi
Mohamed Sudi is a Somali refugee, poet and calligrapher traveller. A member of the Calligraphy Society of Victoria and Melbourne Poets Union, he fuses spoken word with Arabic storytelling to create powerful visual poetry performances. Rooted in Somali oral traditions, his work explores migration, resilience, and identity; from childhood in Mogadishu to survival in Kenyan refugee camps. Through his unique blend of poetry and art, Mo reclaims the refugee narrative, transforming displacement into tribal language stories of hope, humor and cultural pride.
Damon Smith
Damon Smith is a Melbourne-based Musician, writer and filmmaker. Award-winning and known for high-energy, piano-driven live shows, he blends blues, boogie and storytelling into something unpredictable. His documentary Mental As Everything aired nationally and screened internationally.
Miranda Nation
Miranda Nation is an award-winning author, screenwriter and director. Her feature film, Undertow, was released in cinemas in 2020 to critical acclaim. Her original six-part series, Playing Gracie Darling, premiered in 2025 on Paramount + in Australia/ NZ and on Netflix globally. Her debut novel New Skin was published in 2025 by Allen & Unwin.
100 Story Building
100 Story Building is a social enterprise developing creativity and literacy for children and young people, through workshop programs, online learning and community engagement.
Melbourne Blues Appreciation Society
The Melbourne Blues Appreciation Society (MBAS) was formed in 1990. It is affiliated with the Blues Foundation (USA). It’s a not-for-profit organisation, whose mission is to promote: the artists, the music and the culture of the Blues. It holds a weekly event at the Flemington-Kensington Bowls Club, which incorporates a feature act and a series of Blues jams.
MBAS also runs Youth In Blues and Women’N’Blues programmes. Each year it holds a Blues Performer of the Year Challenge. The winners of the Challenge receive an all expenses paid trip to the USA to compete at the International Blues Challenge.