Waanyi writer Alexis Wright is the only author to win the Stella Prize twice - the first time for Tracker and the second time for Praiseworthy. 

Alexis is also the author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, as well as Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; and Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory.

Alexis was previously the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne, and she is the inaugural winner of the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

This interview was recorded live for Vision Australia in March 2024, after Praiseworthy was longlisted for The Stella Prize.  

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Sam Elkin's debut memoir is Detachable Penis: A Queer Legal Saga.

Sam’s essays have been published in the Griffith Review, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and Kill Your Darlings.

He co-edited Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia .

He hosts the 3rrr radio show Queer View Mirror and is a Tilde Film Festival board member. 

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Laurie Steed is a novelist and short story writer. Greater City Shadows, his short story collection, was shortlisted for the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He also published a memoir, Love Dad: Confessions of an Anxious Father, in 2023.

His fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in The Age, Meanjin, Overland, Island, Westerly, and elsewhere.

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Kate Larsen is a writer, poet and arts and cultural consultant with more than 25 years’ experience in the non-profit, government and cultural sectors in Australia, Asia and the United Kingdom. She is one of the contributors behind The Relationship Is the Project.

Kate is a thought leader in the areas of arts governance and cultural leadership, workplace culture and wellbeing, online communication and communities, and being an ally for inclusion and community leadership of underrepresented groups.

Kate has appeared on The Garret before, speaking about her poetry collection Public. Open. Spaces. and the crisis of arts funding in Australia. You can listen to that interview here.

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James Bradley is a writer and critic. He has returned to non-fiction with his latest work, Deep Water: The world in the ocean. His previous books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, Clade and Ghost Species, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. 

His essays and articles have appeared in The Monthly, The Guardian, Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review and Meanjin. In 2012 he won the Pascall Prize for Australia’s Critic of the Year, and he has been shortlisted twice for the Bragg Prize for Science Writing and nominated for a Walkley Award. 

James has previously appeared on The Garret discussing his works of climate fiction.

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Amanda Lohrey writes fiction and non-fiction. Her latest novel, The Conversion, was released in 2023. Her previous novel, The Labyrinth (2021), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, a Tasmanian Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize.

Amanda is also regular contributor to the Monthly magazine and a former senior fellow of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. 

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Nam Le is one of Australia's foremost poets. His short story collection The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and is widely translated, anthologised, and taught. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is his first poetry collection.

Nam has received major awards in America, Europe, and Australia, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and the Melbourne Prize for Literature.

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Catriona Menzies-Pike is a writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. Between 2015 and 2023 she was the editor of the online journal of criticism, the Sydney Review of Books. In this period she also edited four anthologies of Australian critical writing, most recently Critic Swallows Book.

Her newsletter on literature and the internet, Infra Dig.

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Sara Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants. In 2023 she published her first novel, 'Songs for the Dead and the Living', as well as her first poetry collection 'The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat'.

Sara is the first and only poet to win both the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the ground-breaking 2019 anthology 'Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity'.

In this interview Sara speaks about 'The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat' and reads 'The Gaza Suite'. Sara recently spoke on The Garret about Songs for the Dead and the Living.

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Tracey Lien was born and raised in southwestern Sydney and now lives in Brooklyn. All That’s Left Unsaid is her debut novel, and it won the Indie Book Awards for Debut Fiction, the MUD Literary Prize, the Davitt Award for Best Adult Novel and the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize.

About The Garret

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