Sam Carmody is a novelist and WAM Award winning songwriter from Western Australia. His first novel, The Windy Season, won the 2017 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and in 2018 he released his debut EP, Shadow in the Dream. He is currently based in Albany, Western Australia. Madelaine Dickie has been writing since she was seven. Her first novel, Troppo, was published by Fremantle Press in 2016. It won the City of Fremantle T.A.G.
Hungerford Award and was shortlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award and Barbara Jefferis Award. Madelaine loves to travel. A surf-obsession has led Madelaine from Spain's Mundaka to Namibia's Skeleton Coast, to little-known waves in the Dominican Republic. Jake Sandtner is currently completing a PhD at Griffith University on the Gold Coast. Jake spends his day job in marketing and design. When not writing, you can find Jake cruising coastlines, enjoying a cold beer or disrupting his cat's sleeping habits. He is a sucker for motorbikes, a half-hearted photographer, surf lover and a devoted bookworm. Mark Smith lives on Victoria's west coast and has surfed for 45 years.
His debut novel, The Road to Winter (2016), was shortlisted for multiple awards and is taught in schools around Australia. The sequel, Wilder Country (2017), won the 2018 Australian Indie Book Award for YA. The third book in the trilogy, Land of Fences, was published in 2019. Mark is also an award-winning writer of short fiction, with credits including the Josephine Ulrick Literature Prize and the Alan Marshall Short Story Prize. Sally Breen lives on Queensland's Gold Coast. Her work has appeared widely in national and international journals and anthologies such as Asia Literary Review, Meanjin, Open Road Review, The Age, The Best Australian Stories, Review of Australian Fiction, The Guardian UK, Verandah, Overland, The Australian, Hemingway Shorts and Griffith Review. She is a regular contributor to The Conversation. Sally is the author of The Casuals (2011) and Atomic City (2013), which was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards People's Choice Book of the Year in 2014.
Emily Brugman grew up surfing at Broulee, on the south coast of New South Wales. She currently lives in Mullumbimby, and works at Byron Writers Festival. She is a regular contributor to Tracks magazine, and her creative writing has appeared in Overland, Verity La, Tincture Journal, and the UTS Writers' Anthology. She is currently working on her first novel.