Speculate: Workshop, Lunch and Launch

Romy Ash is a critically acclaimed, award winning novelist. Her new novel is a speculative work, Mantle. Her first novel Floundering was shortlisted for The Miles Franklin Award, The Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, amongst others. Her children’s picture book As Bright as a Rainbow was published in 2024. Her essays and journalism have been published in The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, Meanjin, The Griffith Review and others.

Often found sipping french earl grey tea, Alina Ivanova is a freelance journalist, fiction writer, and critic. She is living in Naarm (Melbourne) and has written for the independent journals and news outlets Loiter Magazine, Monash’s Mojo news, Esperanto and Lot’s Wife. She is currently writing a new weird short story anthology about existential crises and the natural world.

Rose Michael’s first novel, The Asking Game, was a runner-up for the Vogel and received an Aurealis honourable mention. An early extract from her second, The Art of Navigation, was shortlisted for a Conjure award and published in Review of Aus Fiction. She has published spec fic in Island, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Best Australian Stories and spec crit in The Conversation, Sydney Review of Books, Reading Like an Australian Writer. Experiments towards her new novel, Else, have been published in international journals Antipodes and Speculative Nonfiction.

Bridie Noonan is a writer, actor, and dramaturg, living and working on unceded Wurundjeri country. Her work largely concerns the eerie and the bodily, exploring themes of desire, illness, and magic. Bridie has provided dramaturgy across both contemporary dance and theatre productions, and has been published in Voiceworks Magazine and The Suburban Review. She is interested in using small things to talk about big things.

Dr Nicola Redhouse is the author of Unlike the Heart, which was listed among the best books of 2019 in The Australian and ABR. Her fiction has appeared in places including Best Australian Stories 2014 and 2015, The Big Issue Fiction Edition, Meanjin and Kill Your Darlings. She is also published in the Guardian, The Age, The Australian, Griffith Review and The Conversation, and her poetry appears in Cordite, The Writing Mind (Prendergast et al) and Slow Canoe Live Journal. She researches applications of psychoanalysis to creative practice and is lecturer in the Publishing program at the University of Melbourne.

Penni Russon is the author of several award-winning and critically acclaimed novels for young people. She’s taught creative writing at universities in Melbourne and Sydney since 2007. In July 2026 she will commence a three year ARC DECRA research fellowship on slow narrative and the ecology of attention in children’s literature written by adults and children’s own creative practice. She is cultivating her own ‘slow’ methods for writing, an approach that values relational and durational composition, playing with the boundaries of poetry and prose, myth and history, self-making and place-making, and human and more-than-human in form and content.