Speakers

Alton Walley is a Whadjuk, Wilman, Kaneang Nyoongar man from the South-West of Western Australia. Alton has been heavily immersed in his culture since he was a young boy, being fortunate enough to have access to, and engage with, a wealth of knowledgeable cultural figures. He has been dancing and playing music with the Middar dance group since he could walk, performing locally, nationally and internationally.

Uniting Humanity

Amy Budrikis writes short stories and has been published in such collections as Once: A Selection of Short Short Stories and Twice Not Shy: One Hundred Short Short Stories.

All in a Flash

Andreas Harsono is an author and journalist. He started his career as a reporter for the Bangkok-based Nation, and the Kuala Lumpur-based Star newspapers. He helped establish Jakarta’s Alliance of Independent Journalists in 1994, and was a founder of the Jakarta-based Institute for the Studies on Free Flow of Information and of the South East Asia Press Alliance, in Bangkok. In 2003 he helped create the Pantau Foundation, a journalist training organisation also based in Jakarta, and since 2008 he has covered Indonesia for Human Rights Watch.

Writing & Rights

Bianca Breen is an emerging YA writer. When she’s not at work at The Literature Centre, she’s the Communications Director of the Australian Young Adult Literature Alliance (LoveOzYA) and the host of YA for WA. Bianca was the YA winner of the 2021 ASA Award Mentorship Program, and a 2022 Upcoming Writer-in-Residence at KSP Writers Centre.

Comparing Notes

Brenton E. McKenna is a young Yawuru artist and writer who fell in love with comic books at a young age. He studied visual arts for two years at Goulburn TAFE and in 2009 was one of twenty successful applicants to be awarded a highly sought-after mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors. Brenton has attended several art workshop/residencies and in doing so has generated much national interest in recent years.

Comparing Notes

Cathy Henkel is Director of the WA Screen Academy at Edith Cowan University and an award-winning documentary filmmaker with 30+ years’ experience. Her work focuses on inspiring, global stories engaging audiences through cinema, television, online and education platforms. Her films have screened in over 26 countries and broadcast on ABC, BBC, CBC, PBS and HBO. She won the Tribeca Best Feature Documentary Award for her film about her mother: The Man who Stole my Mother’s Face. She was awarded SPA Documentary Producer of the Year and received an Emmy nomination for The Burning Season, and has won multiple other festival awards.  Her latest film, Laura’s Choice is streaming on ABC iView and was listed in The Guardian’s 10 Best Australian TV shows of 2021.

When the Camera Stopped Rolling

Chris Binns is not only a distant God-relative of Tim Baker, he also followed his footsteps to the editor’s chair at Australia’s Surfing Life magazine. Fifty issues of ASL later Chris is now Red Bull’s global surfing editor, a regular World Surf League commentator and contributing video producer for renegade surf media outlet Stab. Chris tries his best to live his life by the ocean without too much work getting in the way, and after 15 years spent between the Gold Coast, Bali and Yallingup things are going very much according to plan.

Saltwater Diplomacy

Dr Chris Lin curates local events centred on the arts, literature and social justice, and on the cultures and politics of Myanmar, the place of his birth. His writing has appeared in Peril Magazine, Portside Review and the Australian Book Review. He holds a PhD in English from The University of Western Australia and works for the UWA Public Policy Institute, translating and communicating research to inform public policy.

Whitewashing

Claire Nichols is the host of The Book Show on ABC Radio National, a weekly podcast and radio show that features in-depth interviews with the best authors from around the world. She has spent more than a decade at the ABC, with roles in news, current affairs, local radio and at RN. She is the proud recipient of consecutive WA Media Awards for arts reporting.

Uniting Humanity

Clarissa Goenawan is an Indonesian-born Singaporean writer and translator. Her short stories have won several awards. Rainbirds, her debut novel, has been published in eleven different languages. Her second novel, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, came out in 2020. Watersong is her third novel.

Uniting Humanity Through Creativity      Thrilling!

Dr Dawn Barker is a psychiatrist and author of three novels, as well as non-fiction pieces for various magazines and websites including Good Weekend, Mamamia, Essential Baby, Quartz, Artlink, and the Medical Journal of Australia. Dawn’s first novel, Fractured was shortlisted for the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. Let Her Go is her second novel.

Writing About Trauma

Emily Brugman is a writer who grew up in Broulee on the far south coast of NSW, on the lands of the Yuin people. Her writing has appeared in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies; including Tracks, the UTS Writers’ Anthology and Lines to the Horizon: Australian surf writing. Her debut novel, The Islands, is inspired by her Finnish family’s migration experiences, and their time spent living and working on the Abrolhos Islands between 1959-1972.

The Writing Life   Journeys to the Page

Gillian O'Shaughnessy is an Australian journalist, writer, and presenter. She spent 25 years at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation working in radio and television news, and hosted the Afternoon Show on ABC Radio for ten years until December 2020.

The Writing Life   A Taste of Paon - Literary Lunch

Hassan Al Nawwab was born in Iraq in 1960 and came to Australia in 2003 with his wife and children. He is a poet and journalist who has published three volumes of poetry and two plays in Arabic, and has received numerous awards for his poems. Poems That Do Not Sleep is Hassan’s first collection in English.

Beacon of Hope

Holden Sheppard is an award-winning Young Adult author born and bred in Geraldton, Western Australia. His debut novel Invisible Boys won numerous accolades including the 2018 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award and the 2019 Western Australian Premier’s Book Prize for an Emerging Writer. Holden’s second novel The Brink was published by Text Publishing in August this year. Holden is a misfit: a gym junkie who has played Pokémon competitively, a sensitive geek who loves aggressive punk rock, and a bogan who learned to speak French.

Pulling No Punches

James Foley makes picture books, middle grade novels and comic books for kids. James is the author and illustrator of the S. Tinker Inc graphic novel series and the illustrator of the Toffle Tower series by Tim Harris. His latest release is the picture book Stellarphant. He lives in Perth with his wife, 2 kids, and a Labrador and comes from a long line of queuing enthusiasts.

1000 Words

Jane Castle ACS is a multi-award winning filmmaker whose work as director includes the documentary Sixty Thousand Barrels and the short drama Roadside Café. She is also an award-winning cinematographer and the second woman to be accredited by the Australian Cinematographer’s Society. She has worked extensively in the US and Australia shooting feature films, documentaries and commercials, as well as music videos for performers such as Prince, U2, Mary J Blige, Usher and INXS. Jane has combined her filmmaking with her environmental activism, making a range of campaign videos for groups such as Greenpeace and The Total Environment Centre. When the Camera Stopped Rolling is her first feature-length documentary.

Writing About Trauma    When the Camera Stopped Rolling

Melbourne-born Janet DeNeefe, Founder & Director of the Ubud Food Festival and Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, has lived in Bali for more than three decades. Her latest book is Bali: Food of My Island Home, following her memoir Fragrant Rice. She is also the owner of Casa Luna, Indus Restaurant, and Honeymoon Guesthouse and Bakery in Ubud.

Paon Talking

Jennifer Down is a writer and editor. Her debut novel, Our Magic Hour, was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. The story collection Pulse Points won the 2018 Readings Prize and the 2018 Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. She was named a Sydney Morning Herald Novelist of the Year in 2017 and 2018. Bodies of Light, her second novel, won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.

The Writing Life    A Taste of Paon - Literary Lunch

Josephine Wilson‘s second novel, Extinctions, won the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Colin Roderick Award after winning the inaugural Dorothy Hewett Award in manuscript form. Extinctions was also shortlisted for the 2017 Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction.  Josephine is a Perth-based writer whose career began in the area of performance. Her early works included The Geography of Haunted Places, with Erin Hefferon, and Customs. Her first novel was Cusp, (UWA Publishing, 2005). Josephine teaches at Murdoch University.

A Taste of Paon - Literary Lunch

Justin Randall is an award winning Graphic Novelist and VR artist from Perth, Western Australia, best known for his supernatural thriller series Changing Ways, interior artwork and novel covers for 30 Days of Night and cover art for the Silent Hill comics. His clients include Simon & Schuster, IDW, Gestalt Publishing, and Image Comics. He is currently working on his new title Cavity, interiors for Talgard and the First Nations Indigiverse comic series, Dark Heart.

1000 Words

Laura Keenan is co-publisher and editor at Night Parrot Press. In 2002, Laura met flash fiction in a writers group in Denver, Colorado, and has been head-over-heels for the genre ever since. Her career as an editor spans twenty years, working for publishers including the Perseus Books Group (USA) and UWA Publishing. She runs flash fiction writing workshops in schools, libraries and community centres, encouraging others to obsess over small, intense stories.

All in a Flash

Max Rosochinsky is a poet, translator, and scholar from Simferopol, Crimea. His translations were featured in Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, and others. His translation of Lyuba Yakimchuk’s Prayer was performed at the 2022 Grammy Awards Ceremony by the author. Max’s poetry manuscript had been nominated for the PEN International New Voices Award, and his translations were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He also co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine.

Beacon of Hope

Megan Anderson is a recovering features journalist. Her flash fiction has survived slush piles at Reflex Fiction Quarterly, the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Bridport Prize. She moonlights as an artist under the guise of Hangdog Art. She wrote and illustrated Word of Dog (Fremantle Press), a book about humans.

All in a Flash

Megan McCracken is one half of the @festivalmavens, a duo who spread their love of books and book festivals via their Instagram presence. A leadership coach by day, Megan uses her reader’s eye to draw out the essence of a writer’s work for the audience. She has hosted conversations with global thought leaders, industry leaders and authors of fiction and non-fiction.

Thrilling!

Michael Burrows was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia. As a middle child in the creative chaos of six children, all of whom grew up to have some kind of artistic streak, he never stood a chance. After travelling to London to work at the 2012 Olympics and backpacking through Europe for a year, the great British weather persuaded him to settle in the UK. Michael completed his MA in 2017 at City, University of London, where he wrote the first draft of his novel. Where the Line Breaks is his first novel and was shortlisted for the 2019 Fogarty Literary Award.

Pulling No Punches

Dr Michelle Johnston is a consultant Emergency Physician who works at an inner city hospital. Mostly her days consist of trauma and mess. She believes there is a beating heart of humanity, art, and beauty within the sometimes brutal reality of the Emergency Department, and she has dedicated her career to finding that sweet spot between creativity and critical care medicine. Books are her other oxygen, and writing her sustenance. She is the author of two novels, Dustfall and Tiny Uncertain Miracles.

Writing About Trauma

Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon is from Fremantle/Walyalup and was raised on a farm by her Croatian-immigrant parents. Her writing has appeared in The Australian, Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal and Writers Digest (US). She spent the last decade in the United States where she was a Coordinator at a City College Writing Centre. She has won both the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize and KSP Poetry Prize. In 2019 Ginninderra Press released Natalie’s debut poetry collection First Blood. She recently completed her second poetry collection on motherhood in the wake of the Trump presidency. Currently Natalie is teaching writing at ECU while completing a PhD on historic amnesia.

Beacon of Hope

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukranian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. She is the author of the award-winning Ukrainian poetry collections Xenia and Lovy, while her English poems appeared in AGNI, Cincinatti Review, The Irish Times, Poetry Review, and other journals. Alongside Max Rosochinsky, she co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine and co-translated Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska.

Beacon of Hope

Paul J. Laverty is a Scottish-Australian writer and journalist living between Western Australia and Goldfields, Victoria. His novellas, Man Overbored and Cider Country, along with his Perth-set short story collection, In the State of Excitement, are out now via RoadHouse Media. He wrote the first biography on Grammy award-winners Arcade Fire and another on Beck (Artnik / Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf Verlag). He is the host of 94.9 Main FM book show, The Quiet Carriage, which also airs across the nation on the Community Radio Network, as well as Spotify. He is currently completing a creative writing PhD at Curtin University. His sports fiction, published under the pen name P.J. Laverty is released by Fair Play Publishing and his novel, The Gaffer, will be released November 15, 2022.

All in a Flash

Reda Gaudiamo was born in Surabaya, East Java, in 1962 and currently lives in Jakarta. She writes short stories and novels for young adults. Her books, Na Willa (2018) and Tentang Kita (About Us, 2015), will be published in the UK by the Emma Press in 2019. She was the chief editor of Cosmopolitan Indonesia and a publisher of several international lifestyle magazines in Indonesia. She has won several awards for her short fiction and novels, among others, from Gadis and Femina magazine. Reda is also known as a musician and singer. For more than 30 years, she performed as a duo with her artistic partner, the late Ari Malibu, creating musical interpretations of poems. Currently she’s working on the third series of Na Willa and her very first solo album.

Comparing Notes

Ros Thomas is a West Australian journalist turned author. After a twenty year career in television current affairs she became a long-running columnist for The West Australian Newspaper with a weekly readership of 350,000. Her column collection Was It Something I Said?  was a UWA Publishing best-seller in 2014.  In 2021, Night Parrot Press published her debut novella How To Shame The Devil. Ros’s short stories have won international prizes including the UK STAUNCH Prize in 2021. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Edinburgh Short Story Prize.

Flashes of Brilliance

Sabian Wilde's love of language began with light blue aerograms, sent by a faraway grandfather. Sabian wrote poetry, then songs and music, before becoming a music journalist. Almost thirty years later, Sabian still works with words, but flash fiction brings together the immediacy of music, journalistic observation, and the joy of a child receiving a letter.

Sara Foster is an internationally published, bestselling author living in Western Australia. She has written seven novels: The Hush, You Don’t Know Me, The Hidden Hours, All That is Lost Between Us, Shallow Breath, Beneath the Shadows and Come Back to Me. Her latest published work is a novella, The Deceit, first released as an Audible Original in July 2022. Sara is passionate about writing strong female characters and incorporates contemporary themes into her books, which often traverse the genre areas of psychological suspense, family noir and crime thrillers.

Thrilling!

Scott-Patrick Mitchell is the current recipient of the 2022 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. Their debut collection, Clean, was published earlier this year. Mitchell's flash fiction appears in anthologies and online journals.

FLASHES OF BRILLIANCE

Siang Lu’s fiction and literary reviews have appeared in Southerly and Westerly. He holds a Master of Letters from the University of Sydney. He has written for television on Malaysia’s Astro network. In 2021, Siang won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer for The Whitewash. He has been the program manager for a global, multi-million-dollar initiative to deliver cutting edge AI solutions to the legal industry. He is based in Brisbane, Australia and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Whitewashing   Uniting Humanity

Tim Baker is an award-winning author, journalist and storyteller specializing in surfing history and culture, working across a wide variety of media from books and magazines to film, video, and theatre. He is the best-selling author of The Rip Curl Story, Occy, High Surf, Bustin’ Down The Door, Surf For Your Life, Century of Surf and Surfari.  He is a former editor of Tracks, Surfing Life and Slow Living magazines, a three-time winner of the Surfing Australia Hall of Fame Culture Award, and a popular and compelling public speaker. His most recent book is Patting the Shark.

Saltwater Diplomacy   Writing About Trauma

Dr Vannessa Hearman is Senior Lecturer in History at Curtin University, Western Australia. She is the author of Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Killings in East Java, Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2018), which was awarded the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s inaugural Early Career Book Prize in 2020. She researches and writes about the politics and history of Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Through her research, she aims to foster greater cross-cultural understanding between Australians and those living in the neighbouring countries of Indonesia and Timor-Leste, as well as in illuminating how mass violence and conflict impact our region over time.

Writing and Rights

Wayan Kresna Yasa is a Balinese chef born on the island of Nusa Penida, off Baliʼs east coast. He trained and worked in the US for six years, sharpening his cooking skills in Michelin rated kitchens such as Blue Hill Stone Barns in New York and Acadia in Chicago. His signature cooking style is Modern Balinese, marrying classical French cooking technique with the complex flavor profiles of his Southeast Asia island home. In Bali, Chef Wayan is known for the deftness of his cooking, his deep respect for the environment and his drive to put the flavors from his homeland on the global culinary map. As the Global Executive Chef and Culinary Director for Potato Head family, Wayan opened Ijen, a zero-waste sustainable seafood restaurant,- Kaum, a venue known for its revival of rare Indonesian tribal recipes,- and Tanaman, a plant-based project which was listed as one of the best new restaurants in the world by Condé Nast Traveller in June 2020.  In April this year Chef Wayan left the Potato Head group to open his own restaurant, Home, and to tour with the release of his cookbook, Paon: Real Balinese Cooking. 

A Taste of Paon - Literary Lunch   Cooking With Wayan    Paon Talking