Sam Carmody is a writer and award-winning musician from the mid-west town of Geraldton on the central coast of Western Australia. He is also a previous recipient of the Mary Grant Bruce Award as part of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) National Literary Awards and his short fiction and non-fiction have been published widely online and in print.

Carmody's first novel, The Windy Season, was shortlisted for the 2014 Australian/Vogel's literary Award. He is currently living in Darwin on Australia's Northern Territory coast lecturing in creative writing at the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Higher Education.

Madelaine Dickie studied Creative Arts and Journalism at the University of Wollongong. In 2011 she received a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award to move to West Java, Indonesia, and complete her first novel. As part of this award, she worked with mentors at Universitas Padjadjaran and Universitas Islam Bandung.

Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including Griffith REVIEW (2013), the American journal Creative Nonfiction (2012) and Hecate (2010). Her radio stories have been broadcast on Radio National and she also writes and rides for the surfboard company Treehouse Landscapes and Handshapes.

Mark Smith lives on Victoria’s Surf Coast where he writes and runs outdoor education programs for young adults. His writing has won a number of awards and has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Review of Australian Fiction and the Big Issue. The Road to Winter is his first book.

Emily Brugman grew up in Broulee, on the far south coast of NSW, on the lands of the Yuin people. Her writing has previously appeared in literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Tracks, the UTS Writers' Anthology and Lines to the Horizon: Australian surf writing.

She currently lives in Mullumbimby, on Bundjalung country, and works at Byron Writers Festival. The Islands, her first novel, is inspired by her family's experiences living and working on the Abrolhos Islands between 1959-1972.