Interview
Susan Hampton began her writing life as a performance poet. Her latest book is a memoir called Anything Can Happen, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2024. It recently won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.
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Linsay and John Knight are the founders and publishers of the Sydney-based specialist poetry imprint Pitt Street Poetry. When the press was founded in 2012, most mainstream publishers had stopped publishing Australian poetry. Many well-established mid-career Australian poets were cast adrift. PSP was created to help fill that gap. It was generously supported by the Australia Council in its early years.
... (read more)Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books. He is also the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 and Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. He co-edited At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets, reviewed on page 55.
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Gregory Day is a writer and musician from the west coast of Victoria. He lives on Wadawurrung country. Gregory is a winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize, and the Patrick White Award for his ongoing contribution to Australian literature. He has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, most recently in 2024 for The Bell of the World. His newest collection, Southsightedness, was published in April by Transit Lounge.
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Caro Llewellyn is the author of four works of non-fiction, including her Stella Prize-shortlisted memoir, Diving into Glass (2019). For more than three decades, she has worked with writers variously in publishing and as a festival director and human rights advocate in Australia, France, and the United States, where she lives. Love Unedited, her first novel, is published this month.
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Eileen Chong is an award-winning poet of Hakka, Hokkien and Peranakan descent. She is the author of eleven books. Her most recent book is We Speak of Flowers. She lives and works on unceded Gadigal land of the Eora Nation.
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Lech Blaine is the author of the memoir Car Crash (2021) and the Quarterly Essays Top Blokes (2021) and Bad Cop (2024). He is the 2023 Charles Perkins Centre writer in residence. His writing has appeared in Good Weekend, Griffith Review, The Guardian, and The Monthly. His latest book is Australian Gospel.
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Susan Hawthorne is the author/editor of thirty books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Her latest book, Lesbian: Politics, culture, existence (Spinifex Press), interweaves her thinking about these subjects over a fifty-year period. She has worked in Indigenous education and has taught English as a second language to Arabic-speaking women. For fifteen years, she was an aerialist in two women’s circuses. She researched the torture of lesbians on which her novel Dark Matters is based.
... (read more)Foong Ling Kong is Publisher & CEO at Melbourne University Publishing. Over a two-decade trade publishing career, she has commissioned and edited predominantly non-fiction titles for several Australian publishers. Before her returning to Melbourne University Publishing, where she was Executive Publisher from 2006 to 2010, she was Editor of Debates for the Legislative Assembly at the Parliament of Victoria. She was on the boards of the Stella Prize and Overland, and managing editor of Anne Summers Reports.
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David Hallberg was a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre and the Bolshoi Ballet, a principal guest artist with The Royal Ballet, and resident guest artist with The Australian Ballet. He is the author of a critically acclaimed memoir, A Body of Work: Dancing to the edge and back (2017). He made history in 2011 when he became the first American to join the Bolshoi Ballet under the title premier dancer. In 2021, David Hallberg became the eighth artistic director of The Australian Ballet.
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