Meet our special guests for 2026!

Debra Oswald is a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, creator of the TV series Offspring and two-time winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award. Debra has published nine children’s books and four adult novels, including The Family Doctor, and most recently One Hundred Years of Betty.

 

Her stage plays include Gary’s House, Dags, and Stories in the Dark. Television credits include Police Rescue and Bananas in Pyjamas. Debra performed her one-woman show, Is There Something Wrong With That Lady? at Griffin Theatre and the Ensemble.

Richard Glover is author of the bestsellers The Land Before Avocado and Flesh Wounds. His latest book is Best Wishes, a book about making the world a better, less annoying place, one wish at a time.

 

He presented the Drive show on ABC Sydney radio for 26 years. His journalism has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Washington Post.

Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar woman whose family have belonged to the south coast of Western Australia since before history started being recorded.

 

She is the writer of 3 novels, including the award winning best seller Terra Nullius and her latest, Enclave, and a non-fiction book Lies, Damned Lies that won the Queensland Literary Awards Non-Fiction award.

Tricia is now the bestselling author of eight reality fiction titles, Table for Eight, The Model Wife, The Family Inheritance, Birds of a Feather, Keeping Up Appearances, Back on Track, Head for the Hills and The Road Trip, three historical books set in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges and seven rural romances.

 

Queen of the Road won the Romance Writers of Australia Romantic Book of the Year award in 2013. Riverboat Point was shortlisted for the same award in 2015 and Between the Vines in 2016. Her latest book released in 2025 is The Road Trip.

 

Delving into life experiences, our relationships with family and friends, and what makes us the people we are, is a topic she finds delicious.

Karen Herbert is the author of the crime novels The River Mouth, The Castaways of Harewood Hall, and Vertigo, all published through Fremantle Press. The River Mouth is currently under option for film and television.

 

She has been a writer in residence at Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre and All Saints College in Perth and is the convenor of the long-running Book Length Project Group at the Fellowship of Australian Writers WA.

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Karen holds a Master of Science in Applied Psychology, is a graduate member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Deputy Chair of Writing WA and a Board Member of The Literature Centre.  Her fourth book, The Ghost Walk, is available from bookstores and online in print, e-reader, and audio formats.

Jack Heath was born in 1986 in Sydney, Australia, and spent time in Wollongong and Melbourne before settling in Canberra in 1996. He started writing his first novel as a 13-year-old student at Lyneham High School and submitted it to Pan Macmillan at age 17.

 

The manuscript was picked out of a slush pile and published in 2006 as The Lab. The book became a bestseller in Australia, and it was soon published in North America by Scholastic, and optioned for film in Hollywood.

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In 2009 Jack signed with Curtis Brown Literary Agency, and in 2012 he signed with Booked Out Speakers Agency. In 2017, following the success of 300 Minutes of Danger, he quit his job as a bookseller to write full time. In 2024 he became a co-owner of Novlr.

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He lives with his wife and their two children on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra.