MORE AUTHORS WILL BE ANNOUNCED ON 15 AUGUST 2025. A LIMITED NUMBER OF WEEKEND PASSES ARE AVAILABLE NOW UNTIL SOLD OUT. DAY PASSES AND INDIVIDUAL TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE ALONG WITH THE FULL PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT.
2025 LINE-UP
MORE AUTHORS TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON!
SOFIE LAGUNA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sofie Laguna has written four novels for adults which have won numerous literary awards including the Miles Franklin Award, the Colin Roderick Award and the Indie Award. Titles include ‘The Eye of the Sheep’, ‘The Choke’ and ‘Infinite Splendours’. She has also been shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the ALS Gold Medal, the Voss Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Sofie’s many books for children have been published in the US and the UK and in translation in Europe and Asia, and been named Honour and Notable Books by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. Titles include: Our Australian Girl: The Grace Stories, Too Loud Lily (enjoying its 21-year anniversary edition), and more recently, The Song of Lewis Carmichael, and The Glow, and the picture books, The House on Pleasant Street, and A Friend for Ruby, all illustrated by her husband, Marc McBride. This year Sofie will release a new picture book illustrated by Jess Racklyeft, The Last Egg, and her fifth novel for adults, The Underworld.
KIM MAHOOD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim Mahood is an award-winning writer and visual artist. She is the author of three works of non-fiction; Craft for a Dry Lake (Random House 2000), winner of the Age Book of the Year and the NSW Premier’s prize; Position Doubtful – Mapping Landscape and Memory (Scribe 2016), which received multiple short-listings; and Wandering with Intent (Scribe 2022), which also won the Age Book of the Year for non-fiction. Her essays have been published in art, literary and public affairs journals, and her artwork is held in state, territory and regional collections. She has worked as a writer and consultant on national Indigenous art exhibitions, including the Canning Stock Route Art Project and Songlines for the National Museum of Australia. She continues to develop cross-cultural mapping projects with Aboriginal organisations in remote, regional and urban Australia. Her mapping work is designed to foster communication and understanding between traditional custodians of country and the non-Indigenous stakeholders with an interest in the same country.
DEBRA OSWALD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Debra Oswald is a playwright, screenwriter and novelist. She is a two-time winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Award and author of the novels Useful (2015), The Whole Bright Year (2018) and The Family Doctor (2021). She was creator/head writer of the first five seasons of the successful TV series Offspring. Her stage plays have been performed around the world and published by Currency Press. Gary's House, Sweet Road and The Peach Season were all shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award. Debra has also written four plays for young audiences—Dags, Skate, Stories in the Dark and House on Fire. She has written three Aussie Bites books and six children's novels, including The Redback Leftovers. Her television credits include award-winning episodes of Police Rescue, Palace of Dreams, The Secret Life of Us, Sweet and Sour and Bananas in Pyjamas. Debra performed her one-woman show Is There Something Wrong With That Lady? at the Griffin Theatre in 2021 and a month-long season at the Ensemble in 2023.
JESS HILL
MARK MCKENNA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark McKenna is one of Australia’s leading historians. He is the author of From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (MUP, 2016), which won the NSW Premier’s Prize for Australian History; An Eye for Eternity: The life of Manning Clark (MUP 2011) which won five national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Non-Fiction (2012). Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place (UNSW Press) which won the Book of the Year and the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction in the 2003 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards; and Return to Uluru (Black Inc. 2021), which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. His most recent book is The Shortest History of Australia, Black Inc. 2025.
LINDA JAIVIN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Linda Jaivin is the internationally published author of thirteen books, including a Quarterly Essay, and is the co-editor with Geremie Barmé of the translation anthology New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices. Linda studied Chinese history and language at university, and lived, studied and worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China for a total of nine years. She has been a hospital filing clerk, a petrol station attendant, a China correspondent, essayist, cultural commentator, travel writer, and editor and translates the subtitles for one or two Chinese films a year. Her historical novel A Most Immoral Woman was set in China and Japan against the backdrop of the Russo-Japanese War, and The Empress Lover was set in China as well. Her The Shortest History of China, has been translated and published in two dozen countries. Her most recent book is Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China, and delves into one of modern Chinese history’s darkest, most violent periods and exposes the dangers of authoritarian rule – a relevant theme for today’s world. She is currently working on The Shortest History of Madrid, which along with Beijing and Canberra, is one of her favourite capital cities. She lives in Sydney.
TYSON YUNKAPORTA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tyson Yunkaporta’s bestselling Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story cast an Indigenous lens on contemporary society. Snake Talk is the third book in this trilogy. Co-authored with Megan Kelleher, Snake Talk explores Indigenous thinking through the symbol of serpent, a common foundational narrative. Snake myths echo from a time before truth, and retain the capacity, at this inflection point in history where truth is daily manipulated by bad actors, to unify, humble and inspire us.
The serpent in Australian Aboriginal stories is both a creator and destroyer, dwelling in the liminal spaces between physical and spiritual worlds, story and history. What if this ancient lore extended around the globe? What if the creation stories of the Basilisk, Wyvern, Naga, Quetzalcoatl and many others carried secrets that might help resolve global issues of existential crisis?
In this exhilarating book, the authors speak to elders from Kathmandu to Aotearoa to South America and Europe about a pluriverse of serpent stories, seeking answers to the age-old riddle of how to align the genius of our species with the regenerative patterns of creation. They speak to the makers—the artists and craftspeople who keep the sacred lore of these serpent entities in the ritual images and objects they create. They explore everything from artificial intelligence to immigration through the lens of global serpent lore—through the eye of the snake.
EMILY MAGUIRE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Maguire is the author of seven novels and three non-fiction books. Her novel An Isolated Incident was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and her 2022 book Love Objects was shortlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year. She was the 2018/2019 Writer-in-Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney and the 2023 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University and a 2025 Roderick Fellow at James Cook University. Emily has an MA in literature and works as a mentor to young and emerging writers. Her latest book is the novel, Rapture, which was longlisted for the Stella Prize and shortlisted for the ABIA Literary fiction book of the year.
OMAR MUSA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Omar Musa is an author, visual artist and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He has released two novels, three books of poetry (including Killernova), five hip-hop records, and two acclaimed plays, Since Ali Died and The Offering (with Mariel Roberts Musa). His work has appeared in The Best Australian Stories and Best of Australian Poems. His debut novel Here Come the Dogs was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and Miles Franklin Award and he was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015. He has had several solo exhibitions of his woodcuts, including his most recent collection All My Memories Are Mistranslations. He is based between Borneo and Brooklyn.
HUGH WHITE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Professor Hugh White AO FASSA is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. He spent much of his career in the Australian Government, including as Chief of Staff to Defence Minster Kim Beazley, International Relations Advisor to Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Deputy Secretary for Strategy in the Department of Defence. He was the principal author of the 2000 Defence White Paper. After leaving government he was the founding Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and then Head of ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. His major publications include three Quarterly Essays, Power Shift: Australia’s future between Washington and Beijing [2010], Without America: Australia’s future in the New Asia [2017], and Sleepwalk to War: Australia’s Unthinking Alliance with America [2022], and two books, The China Choice: Why America should share power [2012], and How to defend Australia [2019]. In the 1970s he studied philosophy at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford. In 2022 he was awarded an Honorary D.Litt by ANU.
SONIA ORCHARD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sonia Orchard is an award-winning author, survivor advocate, writing teacher, speaker and festival founder and director. She has authored four books: a memoir ‘Something More Wonderful’; two adult novels ‘The Virtuoso’ and ‘Into the Fire’, and her most recent memoir ‘Groomed’, which follows her journey through the justice system as a complainant in a historical sexual abuse case and coming to terms with the impact of her teenage experience of sexual abuse while parenting teenage girls. She also writes opinion pieces on issues including the environment, parenting and social justice. In 2019, she founded and was the festival director of the Mountain Festival, Australia’s first writers’ festival to focus exclusively on the environment. She lives on Wurundjeri country, one hour from Naarm/Melbourne, with her family and many pets.
QUENTIN SPRAGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Quentin Sprague is the author of The Stranger Artist, which won the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction, and a monograph on the late Australian painter Ken Whisson. His art criticism appears widely, including regularly in The Monthly, as well as in monographs and exhibition catalogues published by the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. He has worked variously as a curator, an academic, an art coordinator and an artist, and lives in Canberra, on Ngunnawal Country, where he is the inaugural Hassall Writers' Fellow at the Australian National University's Drill Hall Gallery.
WINNIE DUNN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Winnie Dunn is Tongan-Australian writer from Mount Druitt. She is the general manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and the editor of several acclaimed anthologies, including Brownface (Cordite, 2018), Sweatshop Women (Sweatshop, 2019), Straight-Up Islander (SBS, 2020) and Another Australia (Affirm Press, 2022). Winnie's debut novel, Dirt Poor Islanders (Hachette 2024) won the 2025 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelists Award and the 2025 Creative Australia Kathleen Mitchell Award. Dirt Poor Islanders was also shortlisted for two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
JADE TIMMS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JADE TIMMS has been writing young adult novels for over fifteen years and reading any book she can get her hands on. She lives with her family on the far south coast of NSW, surrounded by kangaroos, cockatoos, and gum trees. She has a degree in archaeology, a Diploma in Library Services and once spent a year working in a fine art store. She recently completed a Graduate Diploma in Children’s Literature at Deakin University. She currently works in a tiny beachside library and squeezes her writing practice into early mornings and late nights. Golden, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the Text Prize in 2023 and was published by Text Publishing in 2025.