Michael Brissenden
Michael Brissenden is an author and journalist. His first book of fiction – ‘The List’ was published in 2017 and ‘Dead Letters’ 2021 also features the Federal investigator Sidney Allen.
'Smoke' was published in June 2024 and his new book 'Dust' is published in September 2025.
Michael was a journalist with the ABC for 35 years. He was posted to Moscow, Brussels and Washington and worked in Canberra for many years in various roles – including as the Political Editor for the daily television current affairs program – the 7.30 Report, as the ABC’s defence and security correspondent and as the presenter of the ‘AM’ Current Affairs program on ABC radio. From 2017 to 2021 he was a reporter with the ABC’s investigative television documentary program
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Candice Fox
Candice Fox is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney's western suburbs composed of half-, adopted and pseudo siblings. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers.
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As a cynical and trouble-making teenager, her crime and gothic fiction writing was an escape from the calamity of her home life. She was constantly in trouble for reading Anne Rice in church and scaring her friends with tales from Australia's wealth of true crime writers.
Bankstown born and bred, she failed to conform to military life in a brief stint as an officer in the Royal -
Megan Goldin
MEGAN GOLDIN worked as a correspondent for Reuters and other media outlets where she covered war, peace, international terrorism and financial meltdowns in the Middle East and Asia. She is now based in Melbourne, Australia where she raises three sons and is a foster mum to Labrador puppies learning to be guide dogs. She is the author of The Escape Room, The Night Swim, and Stay Awake.
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Tanya Scott
Tanya Scott is an Australian writer, doctor and educator. She is an accomplished survivor of near misses, including escaping from an engineering degree out of high school, crashing a car with a huntsman (spider, not human) on her lap and getting caught in a rip off the coast of Cocos Island. She also managed to finish medical school with her sense of humour intact.
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Over a varied medical career, she has learned more from her patients than from any textbook – not just about physical and mental health, but about humanity, resilience and the absurdity of life. While these themes inform her writing, her love of twisty mysteries has made her an accidental crime writer.
After growing up on the coast in western Victoria, Tanya studied and worked in -
B.M. Carroll
Librarian Note: B.M. Carroll also writes under the name Ber Carroll.
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Christine Gregory
Christine Gregory is an Australian writer of crime and general fiction. An earlier version of The Community, was runner up for the 2022 Banjo Prize. Christine has previously been shortlisted in the Sisters in Crime, Scarlett Stiletto Awards.
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Christine is a former international aid worker and now works as a Director in a national-not for-profit, working on the prevention of violence against women and children. She lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne) with her husband and two children. -
Patricia Wolf
Patricia Wolf grew up in Queensland, Australia, and now lives in Berlin. She likes whisky and strong coffee, busy cities, surf beaches and wild places. Patricia has been a journalist for almost twenty years. She is a regular contributor to newspapers including the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph, among others, and was formerly a design columnist at the Independent and the Lisbon correspondent for Monocle magazine. Outback is her fiction debut.
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Sherryl Clark
Some of my first short stories were crime fiction, and although in the last 20 years I have focused a lot more on writing children's and YA books, I've kept going with my crime writing. The first two novels are now stowed somewhere in the back of my filing cabinet!
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But "Trust Me, I'm Dead", first draft written in 2009, was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger and then published by Verve Books in the UK. What a journey with that novel. I love the character, a grumpy woman (secretly modelled on a young Judi Dench), and couldn't let go of the story. Nine drafts later ...
There are two more Judi novels ("Dead and Gone" and "Mad, Bad and Dead") - but my brand new character is PI Lou Alcott, with "Woman, Missing" published in 2024 by HQ/Harlequin.
M -
Michael Trant
Michael Trant is a WA country boy just beginning his new life as an author, following a wide range of careers from marine draftsman to farmer, and pastoralist to FIFO pot-washer. Michael is now based in Perth, having grown up on the family farm at Eneabba, before moving to Geraldton then out to Yalgoo. His debut novel Ridgeview Station was inspired by his time on Gabyon Station, and he highly recommends a visit for those curious about life on a sheep station.
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Michael writes with an authentic rural voice, drawing on his experiences to open readers to places and lifestyles foreign to many. He has a passion for farming, writing, and gaming, the order of which vary throughout the year. He still works on farms as a tractor driver, mainly to annoy -
Sarah Bailey
Sarah Bailey is a Melbourne-based writer with a background in advertising and communications. She has three sons and is currently the Managing Director of the Melbourne and Sydney offices of advertising agency VMLY&R. Her internationally award-winning Gemma Woodstock series includes The Dark Lake, published in 2017 and winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction and the Davitt Award for Best Debut, followed by Into the Night in 2018, and Where the Dead Go in 2019. Body of Lies is the fourth book in the series. Sarah has also published the bestselling The Housemate and Audible original Final Act in 2021.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
Bryan Brown
Iconic Australian actor Bryan Brown became an international success in the early eighties with critical acclaim from performances in Breaker Morant and the TV series A Town Like Alice. A stream of Australian hits and Hollywood productions followed including The Thorn Birds, Gorillas in the Mist, FX, Newsfront, The Shiralee, Cocktail, Two Hands, Beautiful Kate, Along Came Polly, Australia and in 2019 Palm Beach which he produced and starred in. In a 40-year career Bryan has appeared in over 80 films and worked in some 25 countries. This achievement earned him the prestigious Longford Lyell Award at the 2018 AACTAs recognising his contribution to Australian cinema.
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Steven Carroll
Steven Carroll is an Australian novelist. He was born in 1949 in Melbourne, Victoria and studied at La Trobe University. He has taught English at secondary school level, and drama at RMIT. He has been Drama Critic for The Sunday Age newspaper in Melbourne.
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Steven Carroll is now a full-time writer living in Melbourne with his partner, the writer Fiona Capp, and their son. As of 2019, he also writes the non-fiction book review column for the Sydney Morning Herald. -
Rachel Givney
A writer and filmmaker originally from Sydney, Australia, Givney has worked on many of Australia's most beloved and successful shows such as Offspring, and McLeod's Daughters.
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Rachel Givney's international bestseller Jane in Love was published in 2020 to critical acclaim. Booklist Magazine judged Jane in Love as "outstanding", and Publisher's Weekly named it in their top ten releases for fall 2020. Amazon Studios and Di Novi Pictures (Little Women) have acquired the rights to adapt Jane in Love for the screen. Givney will write the screenplay.
Givney's second novel, Secrets My Father Kept, was published in June 2021, again to critical acclaim.
Her third novel, Don't Say His Name, is out August 2025. -
Mark Wales
Mark Wales grew up in the red dirt of Western Australian mining towns in the Pilbara. While still in high school, he decided he wanted to join Australia's elite military unit, the Special Air Service Regiment (commonly referred to as the SAS), and embarked on a career that would eventually lead him to the battlefields of Afghanistan. There, as a troop commander in charge of 30 elite soldiers, Mark led combat missions deep behind enemy lines.
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Like many who survived this unique and harsh environment, Mark's experiences made a searing impression, allowing him the chance to forge greater resilience and undergo personal growth. Today he is an accomplished corporate speaker, reality TV star, and CEO and founder of a tough luxury fashion label. He -
Riley James
Riley James lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her partner and two children. She was born and raised in north-west Tasmania and trained as a journalist before becoming an academic. The Chilling is her first novel.
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Michael Robotham
Two-times Gold Dagger winner (2015 and 2020), twice Edgar best novel finalist (2016 and 2020) and winner of the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger (2021), Michael Robotham was born in Australia in November 1960 and grew up in small country towns that had more dogs than people and more flies than dogs. He escaped became a cadet journalist on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney.
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For the next fourteen years he worked for newspapers and magazines in Australia, Europe, Africa and America. As a senior feature writer for the UK’s Mail on Sunday he was among the first people to view the letters and diaries of Czar Nicholas II and his wife Empress Alexandra, unearthed in the Moscow State Archives in 1991. He also gained access to Stalin’s Hitler files, which had -
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Mark Brandi
Mark Brandi's bestselling novel, Wimmera, won the coveted British Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger, and was named Best Debut at the 2018 Australian Indie Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year, and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime.
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Mark's second novel, The Rip, was published to critical acclaim in 2019, and his third novel, The Others, was shortlisted for the Best Fiction prize in the 2022 Ned Kelly Awards. His fourth novel, Southern Aurora, was Highly Commended in the 2024 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. His fifth novel, Eden, was published in July 2025.
Mark's shorter work has appeared in The Guardi -
John Byrnes
Born in Sydney, John moved to Mid North Coast of New South Wales with his wife and three children in 2012. He has a broad range of life experience having spent time in the Australian Army, worked fishing trawlers out of Darwin, worked bars and doors in pubs and clubs all over Australia, and somehow ended up with an Economics Degree. He started writing in 2015 and has a fascination with the darker aspects of the human condition; the addicted, the malevolent, the scarred. He cheers for the outsider, the slacker, the contrarian, the non-conformist.
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When he is not writing or pondering the darkness within men's souls he works part-time in financial services. -
Margaret Hickey
Margaret Hickey is an award-winning author and playwright from North East Victoria. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and is deeply interested in rural lives and communities. She is the author of Cutters End and Stone Town.
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Angie Faye Martin
Angie Faye Martin is a writer and editor of Kooma, Kamilaroi and European heritage. With a Bachelor of Public Health from the Queensland University of Technology and a Masters of Anthropology from the Australian National University, Angie spent many years working in policy roles in state and federal government before launching Versed Writings in 2019. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Garland, The Saltbush Review and The Rocks Remain. She is a member of the First Nations Australia Writers Network and accredited with the Institute of Professional Editors. Melaleuca is her debut novel.
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Angie Faye Martin
Angie Faye Martin is a writer and editor of Kooma, Kamilaroi and European heritage. With a Bachelor of Public Health from the Queensland University of Technology and a Masters of Anthropology from the Australian National University, Angie spent many years working in policy roles in state and federal government before launching Versed Writings in 2019. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Garland, The Saltbush Review and The Rocks Remain. She is a member of the First Nations Australia Writers Network and accredited with the Institute of Professional Editors. Melaleuca is her debut novel.
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Shelley Burr
Shelley Burr works at the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment in Canberra, Australia. She grew up splitting her time between Newcastle and Glenrowan, where her father's family are all sheep farmers.
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Bruce Nash
I have always written.
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For three decades, I taught English in Secondary Schools throughout Queensland.
I survived.
I now live and write and make habitat on the far south coast of New South Wales, on Djiringanj Country by the shores of Wallaga Lake, with my partner Deborah, our dogs Finnegan and Rupert, numerous chooks, a Satin Bower Bird called Lord Byron, a Diamond Python who shall remain nameless, and numerous Wattlebirds, Lorikeets, Galahs, White-headed Pigeons, Whipbirds, King Parrots, Crimson Rosellas, Black Cockatoos, Eastern Spinebills.......
All the Words We Know is my most recent novel, published by Allen & Unwin in 2024.
My previous novel was The Long River of Cat Fisher, published in 2020 by Australian Scholarly Publishing (Arden -
Christian White
Christian White is an Australian author and screenwriter. His debut novel, The Nowhere Child, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He co-created the television series Carnivores, currently in development with Matchbox Pictures and Heyday TV, and co-wrote Relic, a psychological horror feature film to be produced by Carver Films (The Snowtown Murders, Partisan).
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Born and raised on the Mornington Peninsula, Christian had an eclectic range of ‘day jobs’ before he was able to write full-time, including food-cart driver on a golf course and video editor for an adult film company. He now spends his days writing from his home in Melbourne where he lives with his wife, the filmmaker Summer DeRoche, and their adopt -
Tim Ayliffe
Tim Ayliffe’s thriller novels have been informed by his 25-year career as a journalist in Australia and around the world. He writes about espionage, extremism, politics and the global power games at play in the 21st Century.
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He is the author of the ‘John Bailey’ series including The Greater Good, State of Fear, The Enemy Within, Killer Traitor Spy and The Wrong Man. Tim's thrillers are also in development for TV.
When he's not writing or chasing news stories, Tim watches rugby and surfs. He lives in Sydney. -
Dervla McTiernan
Number one internationally bestselling author Dervla McTiernan is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of six novels, including the much-loved Cormac Reilly series and two number 1 bestselling standalone thrillers, The Murder Rule and What Happened to Nina?, both New York Times Best Thrillers of the Year and both currently in development for screen adaptation. Dervla is also the author of four novellas, and her audio novella, The Sisters, was a four-week number one bestseller in the United States. Before turning her hand to writing, Dervla spent twelve years working as a lawyer in her home country of Ireland. Following the global financial crisis, she relocated to Western Australia where she now lives with her husband, two chil
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Iain Ryan
Iain Ryan grew up in the outer suburbs of Brisbane, Australia. He predominantly writes in the hard-boiled/noir genre and his work has been previously published by Akashic Books Online, Crime Factory, Kill Your Darlings and Seizure.
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His novella, Four Days, was published in November 2015 by small press Broken River Books (Portland, USA). The following year the book was shortlisted for the Australian Crime Writing Association’s Ned Kelly Awards (Best Debut Fiction). It didn’t win. Then Broken River Books folded, and the book fell out-of-print. On a roll, Ryan wrote and
self-published a trilogy of grimy romans durs, all set in the Queensland tropics: Drainland (2016), Harsh Recovery (2016), and Civil Twilight (2017).
Disillusioned with self-publis -
Chris Hammer
Chris Hammer is a leading Australian crime fiction author. His first book, Scrublands, was an instant #1 bestseller upon publication in 2018. It won the prestigious UK Crime Writers' Association John Creasey New Blood Dagger and was shortlisted for awards in Australia and the United States.
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Scrublands has been sold into translation in several foreign languages. Chris's follow-up books—Silver (2019), Trust (2020), Treasure & Dirt (2021), The Tilt (2022) and The Seven (2023)—are also bestsellers and all have been shortlisted for major literary prizes. The Valley is his seventh novel.
The Tilt (published as Dead Man's Creek in the UK) was named The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Year for 2023.
Scrublands has been adapted for television, screening -
Jane Caro
Jane Caro wears many hats; including author, lecturer, mentor, social commentator, columnist, workshop facilitator, speaker, broadcaster and award-winning advertising writer. Jane runs her own communications consultancy and lectures in Advertising Creative at The School of Communication Arts at UWS. She has published three books: The Stupid Country: How Australia is dismantling public education co-authored with Chris Bonnor (2007), The F Word. How we learned to swear by feminism co-authored with Catherine Fox (2008), and Just a Girl (UQP, 2011). She has also appeared on Channel 7’s Sunrise, ABC’s Q&A and ABC’s The Gruen Transfer.
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Patricia Wolf
Patricia Wolf grew up in Queensland, Australia, and now lives in Berlin. She likes whisky and strong coffee, busy cities, surf beaches and wild places. Patricia has been a journalist for almost twenty years. She is a regular contributor to newspapers including the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph, among others, and was formerly a design columnist at the Independent and the Lisbon correspondent for Monocle magazine. Outback is her fiction debut.
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Margaret Hickey
Margaret Hickey is an award-winning author and playwright from North East Victoria. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and is deeply interested in rural lives and communities. She is the author of Cutters End and Stone Town.
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Paul Daley
Author and journalist Paul Daley's books—Canberra, Collingwood: A Love Story, Beersheeba and Armaggedon—have been finalists in major literary awards, including the Nib, the Manning Clark House Cultural Awards and the Prime Minister's History Prize. He is the winner of the Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism and the Paul Lyneham Award for Press Gallery journalism. In 2013 he co-wrote, with Katie Pollock, the acclaimed political play, The Hansard Monologues. He also writes essays and short stories, and about history and national identity for The Guardian and Meanjin. He lives in Canberra with his wife, Lenore Taylor, and their children. This is his first novel.
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Michael Robotham
Two-times Gold Dagger winner (2015 and 2020), twice Edgar best novel finalist (2016 and 2020) and winner of the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger (2021), Michael Robotham was born in Australia in November 1960 and grew up in small country towns that had more dogs than people and more flies than dogs. He escaped became a cadet journalist on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney.
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For the next fourteen years he worked for newspapers and magazines in Australia, Europe, Africa and America. As a senior feature writer for the UK’s Mail on Sunday he was among the first people to view the letters and diaries of Czar Nicholas II and his wife Empress Alexandra, unearthed in the Moscow State Archives in 1991. He also gained access to Stalin’s Hitler files, which had -
Christine Gregory
Christine Gregory is an Australian writer of crime and general fiction. An earlier version of The Community, was runner up for the 2022 Banjo Prize. Christine has previously been shortlisted in the Sisters in Crime, Scarlett Stiletto Awards.
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Christine is a former international aid worker and now works as a Director in a national-not for-profit, working on the prevention of violence against women and children. She lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne) with her husband and two children. -
Sara Foster
Sara Foster is a critically acclaimed, bestselling fiction author with a passion for psychological suspense and a keen interest in exploring zeitgeist issues and strong female characters in her nail-biting novels. Her latest, When She Was Gone (2025), begins when an au pair and two small children vanish from a remote Australian beach, and is a race-against-time thriller, exploring themes around misogyny, wealth, power and control.
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Sara is also the author of dystopian thriller The Hush and seven more bestselling novels. Two of her books have been optioned for television, and You Don’t Know Me was adapted into a chart-topping podcast series by Listnr. Sara has a PhD in creative writing (studying maternal representations in fiction) and lives i -
Petronella McGovern
Petronella McGovern writes psychological thrillers focusing on everyday characters and contemporary issues.
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Petronella is fascinated by what makes us tick, the lies we tell, and the secrets we keep. She is the best-selling author of Six Minutes, The Good Teacher, The Liars and The Last Trace. Her books have been nominated in the Ned Kelly Awards, the Davitt Awards and the Australian Independent Bookseller Awards. The Liars was selected in the Top 100 Big W/Better Reading list for 2023.
Petronella grew up in a large family on a farm in New South Wales. Australian landscapes and the bush feature strongly in her stories. Among other adventures, she has worked on a summer camp in America and travelled in eastern Africa which inspired parts of h -
Louise Milligan
Louise Milligan is a multi-award-winning investigative journalist for ABC TV's Four Corners, the Australian national broadcaster's flagship current affairs documentary program. She is the author of two bestselling non-fiction books: Cardinal, The Rise and Fall of George Pell and Witness, An Investigation into the Brutal Cost of Seeking Justice. Her books have been awarded multiple prizes, including the Walkley Book Award, the Davitt Awards Best Non-Fiction Crime Book, the Melbourne Prize for Literature People's Choice Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award's People's Choice prize, the Sir Owen Dixon Chambers Law Reporter of the Year Award, a Press Freedom Medal and a shortlisting for the Stella Prize. Louise's journalism, particularl
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Karen Kirsten
Karen Kirsten is the author of Irena's Gift, a 2025 National Jewish Book Award finalist, winner of Zibby Awards for Best Family Drama & Best Story of Overcoming, an Australian Jewish Book Award finalist, and described by Pulitzer prize winning author Geraldine Brooks as, “a disturbing investigation into the power of secrets to harm and to haunt.”
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Karen is an Australian-American writer and Holocaust educator who speaks on the topics of hatred and reconciliation around the world. Her essay, “Searching for the Nazi Who Saved My Mother’s Life” was selected by Narratively as one of their Best Ever stories and nominated for The Best American Essays. Karen’s writing has also appeared in Salon, Huffington Post, The Week, The Jerusalem Post, WIEZ in -
Molly Schmidt
Molly Schmidt is a writer and journalist from the coastal town of Albany, Western Australia. An only child, she grew up roaming paddocks and climbing paperbark trees on Menang Noongar country. Storytelling has been part of Molly’s world since she could speak. When she was ten years old, her father lost his battle with terminal cancer. Molly began writing to process this loss, and through written word has found healing, growth and her life path. Throughout both her journalism career and novel writing practice, Molly is passionate about producing stories that are inclusive of all members of her community. While writing Salt River Road, she collaborated with Noongar Elders from Albany, with the goal of producing a novel that actively pursues r
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Simon Rowell
Also published under S.D. Rowell
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Simon Rowell is a bestselling Australian crime mystery author, who was born in Adelaide, South Australia.
A graduate of both the University of South Australia and Flinders University, Simon’s work centres on the interplay between culture, morality and truth, which is explored within the bestselling novel, "The Echo of Others". The book was long-listed for the Ned Kelly Award, Australia's pre-eminent crime literature award, for Best First Crime novel.
Simon has published a trilogy of novels focused on a detective with PTSD, who works with a service dog. These novels are The Long Game, Wild Card and The Good Dog.
As a teenager, Simon worked in outback South Australia in the Cooper Basin oil & gas fields and later -
Bruce Nash
I have always written.
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For three decades, I taught English in Secondary Schools throughout Queensland.
I survived.
I now live and write and make habitat on the far south coast of New South Wales, on Djiringanj Country by the shores of Wallaga Lake, with my partner Deborah, our dogs Finnegan and Rupert, numerous chooks, a Satin Bower Bird called Lord Byron, a Diamond Python who shall remain nameless, and numerous Wattlebirds, Lorikeets, Galahs, White-headed Pigeons, Whipbirds, King Parrots, Crimson Rosellas, Black Cockatoos, Eastern Spinebills.......
All the Words We Know is my most recent novel, published by Allen & Unwin in 2024.
My previous novel was The Long River of Cat Fisher, published in 2020 by Australian Scholarly Publishing (Arden -
Mark Brandi
Mark Brandi's bestselling novel, Wimmera, won the coveted British Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger, and was named Best Debut at the 2018 Australian Indie Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year, and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime.
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Mark's second novel, The Rip, was published to critical acclaim in 2019, and his third novel, The Others, was shortlisted for the Best Fiction prize in the 2022 Ned Kelly Awards. His fourth novel, Southern Aurora, was Highly Commended in the 2024 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. His fifth novel, Eden, was published in July 2025.
Mark's shorter work has appeared in The Guardi -
Anna Funder
Anna Funder was born in Melbourne in 1966. She has worked as an international lawyer and a radio and television producer. Her book Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize. She lives in Sydney with her husband and family.
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Shelley Burr
Shelley Burr works at the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment in Canberra, Australia. She grew up splitting her time between Newcastle and Glenrowan, where her father's family are all sheep farmers.
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Tanya Scott
Tanya Scott is an Australian writer, doctor and educator. She is an accomplished survivor of near misses, including escaping from an engineering degree out of high school, crashing a car with a huntsman (spider, not human) on her lap and getting caught in a rip off the coast of Cocos Island. She also managed to finish medical school with her sense of humour intact.
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Over a varied medical career, she has learned more from her patients than from any textbook – not just about physical and mental health, but about humanity, resilience and the absurdity of life. While these themes inform her writing, her love of twisty mysteries has made her an accidental crime writer.
After growing up on the coast in western Victoria, Tanya studied and worked in -
Cameron Stewart
Cameron Stewart grew up in Australia on farm near Mullumbimby, by way of Alice Springs, Canberra and Cairns. After living and working in Sydney for many years, Cameron now resides in Seoul, South Korea. Diversity of place informs much of his writing as does an interest in flawed characters trying to do their best. Cameron holds an MA (Creative Writing) from the University of Technology, Sydney and a BA (Performing Arts) from the University of Western Sydney (Theatre Nepean). Cameron is an award winning, short fiction writer and has been published in Australia, the UK and the USA. Why Do Horses Run? is Cameron's debut novel. He is currently working on his second novel, Cosmonaut.
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James Bradley
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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James is the author of five novels: the critically acclaimed climate change narratives, Ghost Species (Hamish Hamilton 2020) and Clade (Hamish Hamilton 2015); The Resurrectionist (Picador 2006), which explores the murky world of underground anatomists in Victorian England and was featured as one of Richard and Judy's Summer Reads in 2008; The Deep Field (Sceptre 1999), which is set in the near future and tells the story of a love affair between a photographer and a blind palaeontologist; and Wrack (Vintage 1997) about the search for a semi-mythical Portuguese wreck. He has also written The Change Trilogy for young a -
Dave Warner
Dave Warner is the author of fourteen crime novels, including the winner of the 1996 WA Premier’s Award for Fiction (City of Light) and the 2016 Ned Kelly winner of Best Australian Crime Fiction (Before it Breaks). He has also written a children's book series and seven non-fiction titles, and screenwritten for film and TV.
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Dave Warner originally gained national recognition as a musician-songwriter in the late 1970s with Bob Dylan referring to Dave and Richard Clapton as his “favourite Australian artists”.
As early as 1973 Dave had formed Australia’s first punk band, Pus, playing early versions of tracks such as Suburban Boy and Hot Crotch which he was later to record with Dave Warner’s from the Suburbs. In 1975, Dave went to London and wrot -
Peter Goldsworthy
Peter Goldsworthy grew up in various Australian country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin. After graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1974, he worked for many years in alcohol and drug rehabiiltation. Since then, he has divided his time equally between writing and general practice. He has won major literary awards across a range of genres: poetry, short story, the novel, in opera, and most recently in theatre.
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Garry Disher
Garry Disher was born in 1949 and grew up on his parents' farm in South Australia.
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He gained post graduate degrees from Adelaide and Melbourne Universities. In 1978 he was awarded a creative writing fellowship to Stanford University, where he wrote his first short story collection. He travelled widely overseas, before returning to Australia, where he taught creative writing, finally becoming a full time writer in 1988. He has written more than 40 titles, including general and crime fiction, children's books, textbooks, and books about the craft of writing. -
Aoife Clifford
Aoife Clifford is the author of the novel All These Perfect Strangers, published in Australia and the United Kingdom by Simon & Schuster and by Penguin Random House in the United States.
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Born in London of Irish parents, she grew up in New South Wales, studied Arts/Law at the Australian National University, Canberra and now lives in Melbourne.
Aoife has won two premier short story prizes for crime fiction in Australia - the Scarlet Stiletto (2007) and the S.D. Harvey Ned Kelly Award in 2012, among other prizes. She has also been short listed for the UK Crime Association's Debut Dagger. In 2014 she was awarded an Australian Society of Authors mentorship for her novel, All These Perfect Strangers.
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Kirsty Manning
Kirsty Manning grew up in northern New South Wales. She has degrees in literature and communications and worked as an editor and publishing manager in book publishing for over a decade. A country girl with wanderlust, her travels and studies have taken her through most of Europe, the east and west coasts of the United States and pockets of Asia. Kirsty’s journalism specialising in lifestyle and travel regularly appear in magazines, newspapers and online.
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With husband Alex Wilcox, Kirsty is a partner in the award-winning Melbourne wine bar Bellota, and the Prince Wine Store in Sydney and Melbourne. -
Lia Hills
Lia Hills is a poet, novelist and translator. Her work has been published, translated and performed in countries as varied as Japan, Switzerland and the US.
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Lia’s latest novel, The Crying Place, is due for release with Allen and Unwin in March 2017. Recipient of a Creative Victoria grant in 2012 for her work on the novel, Lia has travelled regularly to the centre of Australia to research and write The Crying Place, set partly in Pitjantjatjara country. As part of the process, Lia stayed in Aboriginal communities and began learning the Pitjantjatjara language.
Her debut young adult novel, The Beginner’s Guide to Living received starred reviews and was shortlisted for the Victorian, Queensland and Western Australian Premiers’ Literary Awards, a -
Paul Daley
Author and journalist Paul Daley's books—Canberra, Collingwood: A Love Story, Beersheeba and Armaggedon—have been finalists in major literary awards, including the Nib, the Manning Clark House Cultural Awards and the Prime Minister's History Prize. He is the winner of the Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism and the Paul Lyneham Award for Press Gallery journalism. In 2013 he co-wrote, with Katie Pollock, the acclaimed political play, The Hansard Monologues. He also writes essays and short stories, and about history and national identity for The Guardian and Meanjin. He lives in Canberra with his wife, Lenore Taylor, and their children. This is his first novel.
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Luke Johnson
Luke is a writer from Ocean Grove, on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, Australia. He is married with two daughters. He is a physiotherapist by trade, combining this with his love of reading and writing. A fan of literary fiction, crime fiction, and strong Australian-facing narratives and overtones, his debut, King Tide, is due out on July 29 2025 through Affirm Press / Simon & Schuster.
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Tim Ayliffe
Tim Ayliffe’s thriller novels have been informed by his 25-year career as a journalist in Australia and around the world. He writes about espionage, extremism, politics and the global power games at play in the 21st Century.
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He is the author of the ‘John Bailey’ series including The Greater Good, State of Fear, The Enemy Within, Killer Traitor Spy and The Wrong Man. Tim's thrillers are also in development for TV.
When he's not writing or chasing news stories, Tim watches rugby and surfs. He lives in Sydney. -
Maryrose Cuskelly
Maryrose Cuskelly is a writer of fiction and non-fiction.
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She is the best-selling author of The Cane (Allen & Uwin 2022), shortlisted for best debut in the 2023 Davitt Awards.
In 2019, her book Wedderburn: A True Tale of Blood and Dust (Allen & Unwin, 2018), was longlisted for Best Debut and Best True Crime in the 2019 Davitt Awards.
In 2016, she was awarded the New England Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing (non-fiction) for her essay on the 1972 abduction and murder of Marilyn Wallman.
She is the author of Original Skin: Exploring the Marvels of the Human Hide (Scribe 2010) and The End of Charity: Time for Social Enterprise (Allen & Unwin 2008) co-written with Nic Frances, and winner of the Iremonger Award for Writing on Public Issues.
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Lisette Reymer
Lisette Reymer now works at Stuff as Senior Journalist - International and National Affairs.
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Lisette's work in Ukraine saw her win won Reporter of the Year at the NZTV awards for 2024; Best Reporter at the 2023 Voyager Media Awards as well as Best Coverage of a Major News Event. -
Iain Ryan
Iain Ryan grew up in the outer suburbs of Brisbane, Australia. He predominantly writes in the hard-boiled/noir genre and his work has been previously published by Akashic Books Online, Crime Factory, Kill Your Darlings and Seizure.
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His novella, Four Days, was published in November 2015 by small press Broken River Books (Portland, USA). The following year the book was shortlisted for the Australian Crime Writing Association’s Ned Kelly Awards (Best Debut Fiction). It didn’t win. Then Broken River Books folded, and the book fell out-of-print. On a roll, Ryan wrote and
self-published a trilogy of grimy romans durs, all set in the Queensland tropics: Drainland (2016), Harsh Recovery (2016), and Civil Twilight (2017).
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Mandy Beaumont
Mandy is an award-winning writer and a researcher in creative writing. Her debut novel The Furies was long-listed for the prestigious Stella Prize and shortlisted for the MUD Literary Prize. The Furies was also shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards Fiction Book of the Year . Her collection of short stories, Wild, Fearless Chests, was shortlisted for the Richell Prize and the Dorothy Hewett Award. Stories from the collection also won the MOTH International Short Story Prize and were shortlisted for other notable awards. She is a convenor in creative writing at Griffith University and holds a PhD and a Research Masters in creative writing. She is also a regular feature writer and book reviewer for The Big Issue.
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Jack Beaumont
Jack Beaumont is the pseudonym of a former operative in the clandestine operations branch of the French foreign secret service, the DGSE. He joined 'The Company' after being an air force fighter pilot and later flying special operations and intelligence missions. Beaumont's background gives The Frenchman a level of authenticity that few other spy thrillers have been able to achieve.
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Steve Lewis
Steve Lewis has been reporting politics in Canberra since 1992 and has survived the near collapse of the Fairfax media group, three Prime Ministers, Mark Latham and a career switch from The Financial Review to the News Ltd tabloids.
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David Dyer
David Dyer grew up near Sydney, Australia. After school, he pursued an eclectic career that included studying medicine, travelling the world in merchant ships, and working as a lawyer in Sydney and London. He was a solicitor for several years at the London legal practice whose parent firm represented the Titanic’s owners in 1912. Upon his return to Australia, he became an English teacher and writer, and in 2013 was awarded a doctorate in creative arts. In 2016, he published The Midnight Watch, a novel about the ship that witnessed the Titanic’s distress rockets but failed to respond. He then turned his attention to space, and in 2019 was lucky enough to meet moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin and Charlie Duke, who inspired him with their vision, darin
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Chris Sarra
Born in Queensland’s Bundaberg in 1967 as the youngest of 10 children to an Italian father and an Aboriginal mother, Chris Sarra is now the head of the Stronger Smarter Institute at QUT. He was formerly the principal of Cherbourg State School. He has had an extensive career in education, completing a Diploma of Teaching, a Bachelor of Education, a Master of Education and a PhD in Psychology.
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Peter Greste
Peter Greste was born in Sydney and studied journalism at the Queensland University of Technology. His work as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, the BBC and Al Jazeera has taken him around the world, and he has lived in London, Belgrade, Africa, South America and Afghanistan. He was awarded a Peabody Award in 2011 for his documentary on Somalia, and the Australian Human Rights Medal in 2015 for his work as an advocate of a free press. In 2103 he was arrested in Cairo, along with his Al Jazeera colleagues, for reporting news that was ‘damaging to national security’. He was subsequently tried and convicted for seven years, but was released without explanation after 14 months in prison, an experience he and his family recounted in Freeing P
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