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Melissa has always loved reading. She grew up 700m from the local library and spent most of her time there browsing and borrowing books. Melissa is passionate about literacy and education and believes the ability to read and write gives power to change. “Things work out the best for those who make the best of the way things work out.” This is the motto Melissa has lived by most of her life and has allowed her to live and travel overseas and see some amazing places including Egypt, Italy, Spain, and Africa. She has also travelled closer to home and got...

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When Elizabeth Jane Corbett isn’t writing, she works as a librarian, teaches Welsh at the Melbourne Welsh Church, writes reviews and articles for the Historical Novel Society, and serves as the Social Media Coordinator on the Historical Novels Society of Australasia Conference committee. She also blogs at elizabethjanecorbett.com. In 2009, her short-story, 'Beyond the Blackout Curtain', won the Bristol Short Story Prize. Another, 'Silent Night', was short listed for the Allan Marshall Short Story Award. Her debut novel, The Tides Between, was named on the 2018 Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book list. Elizabeth lives with her husband, Andrew,...

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Patricia Leslie is a Sydney author with a passion for combining history, fantasy, and action into stories that nudge at the boundaries of reality. Urban fantasy is the ideal genre for exploring alternative history and Patricia does just this in her debut novel, The Ouroboros Key; a contemporary quest story set in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Her second novel, A Single Light, leaves known history behind, and joins fantasy with beach and bush south of Sydney where the mild seeming landscape becomes the setting for a potential world-altering event. Walks through the bush will never be the same again!...

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Malve von Hassell is a freelance writer, researcher, and translator. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the New School for Social Research. She edited her grandfather Ulrich von Hassell's memoirs written in prison in 1944, and has taught at Queens College, Baruch College, Pace University, and Suffolk County Community College, while continuing her work as a translator and writer. She lives in Southampton, New York. What drew you to write historical fiction? I have always loved historical fiction for bringing alive the past as much as for showing possibilities for the present. One of my favourite authors in this genre...

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Tracy M Joyce is an Australian author of speculative fiction. Tracy has long been a fan of the fantasy genre, but particularly likes novels that deal with deep characterisations and that don’t flinch from the gritty realities of life. This and her fascination with the notions of “moral greyness”, that “good people can do bad things” and that we cannot escape our past provide the inspiration for her writing. Combine that with her love of history, horses and archery, and you have Altaica. She grew up on a farm in rural Victoria, in a picturesque dot on the map known...

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Vacen Taylor is an author, writer, storyteller, occasional artist, and amateur photographer. She describes her writing as a basic prose style with the occasional splash of creative penning. She collects comics and loves superheroes, anime, and science. Her Starchild series has been incredibly popular with young readers, but there's lots more in store from this incredibly talented author and screenplay writer. What drew you to base the elemental themes in the Starchild series on the seven chakras?   I have always been interested in energy. But what type of energy, right? I am referring to the energy found in the body....

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Patricia Worth has a Master of Translation Studies from the Australian National University. Her translation of George Sand’s Spiridion was published in 2015, and two bilingual short story books from New Caledonia were published in 2017 and 2018. A number of her translations have appeared in Australian, New Caledonian and US literary journals including Southerly Journal, Transnational Literature, The Brooklyn Rail and Delos Journal. What drew you to translate 19th-century literature? I’ve been reading 19th-century literature since my school days, so my first choice for literature to translate comes from this era. I enjoyed Jean Lorrain’s fantastical tales remembered from...

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Kathryn Gossow is a writer and sometimes gardener living in a two acre garden in a pocket of the Brisbane River. When she is writing, her garden is a mess. When she is gardening, she forgets to write. It seems she cannot have both. She writes for that elusive feeling when she gets into the zone and there is nothing else in the world but her and the words that tumble onto the page. Kathryn has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, won a commendation in the Australian Horror Writers’ Association Flash Fiction Competition and has a number of published...

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Mark Newman has been shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award, highly commended in the New Writer Prose & Poetry Awards and Bristol Prize longlisted. His work has won competitions judged by Alison Moore, Tania Hershman and David Gaffney. He has been published in Firewords Quarterly, Fiction Desk and Paper Swans. He has eight stories in the Retreat West competition anthology Inside These Tangles, Beauty Lies. My Fence is Electric and Other Stories is a collection of award winning short stories looking at those moments in life that fizz with the electric intensity of change. A housing estate is in shock following a child’s disappearance. A girl and her invisible friend go their separate ways. A father and a...

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Julian Barr first fell in love with all things Greek and Roman in childhood, when he staged his own version of I, Claudius using sock puppets. After his PhD in Classics, he did a brief stint as a schoolteacher, hated being called ‘sir’, and dived into storytelling. Although he remains open to the possibilities of sock puppet theatre, historical fantasy is his passion. He has published scholarly research on Roman medicine and the gastronomic habits of centaurs, but prefers to think of himself as an itinerant bard. What drew you to adapt about Virgil's epic poem for fantasy readers? Haha, Virgil’s epic...

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