You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• FOCUS ON… Matching Style to Genre
• WIN Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Writer in residence: Victoria Purman

Victoria Purman is an Australian top ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author. Her latest book The Radio Hour is out now. Her historical fiction books A Woman’s Work, The Nurses’ War, The Women’s Pages, The Land Girls and The Last of the Bonegilla Girls have all been Australian bestsellers. Her earlier novel The Three Miss Allens was a USA Today bestseller. She is a regular guest at writers festivals, a mentor and workshop presenter across Australia, and has judged the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the 2022 ASA/HQ Commercial Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript.

Follow Victoria on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow HQ Books on Instagram.

You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• FOCUS ON… Matching Style to Genre
• WIN Hard Copy by Fien Veldman
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Writer in residence: Amy T. Matthews

Amy T. Matthews is an award-winning author, an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Flinders University, and the co-host of the podcasts Word Docs and Love on Campus. Amy lives in Adelaide with a collection of beloved people both real and imagined.

Follow Amy on Instagram.

Follow SimonSchusterANZ on Twitter and Instagram.

You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• WIN Lies & Weddings by Kevin Kwan 
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Writer in residence: Petronella McGovern

Petronella McGovern is fascinated by what makes us tick, the lies we tell, and the secrets we keep. She is the best-selling author of Six Minutes, The Good Teacher, The Liars and The Last Trace. Her books have been nominated in the Ned Kelly Awards, the Davitt Awards and the Australian Independent Bookseller Awards. The Liars was selected in the Top 100 Big W/Better Reading list for 2023. Petronella has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and tutors in creative writing. She grew up on a farm in central west NSW and now lives with her family in Sydney on Gadigal Country. Among other adventures, she has worked on a summer camp in America and travelled in eastern Africa which inspired parts of her fourth novel, The Last Trace.

Follow Petronella on Instagram.

Follow Allen & Unwin on Twitter and Instagram.

You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• WIN The Haters by Robyn Harding
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Writer in residence: Lia Hills

Lia Hills is an award-winning poet, novelist and translator, born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has been published, translated and performed around the world.

Her debut novel, The Beginner’s Guide to Living (Text, 2009), was critically acclaimed both in Australia and overseas, and was shortlisted for the Victorian, Queensland and Western Australian Premiers’ Literary Awards, and the NZ Post Book Awards. It was translated and sold into numerous countries, including Germany, Brazil, Greece and the US (Farrer, Straus & Giroux).

Lia’s second novel, The Crying Place (Allen and Unwin, 2017), was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2018 and named Book of the Month by Australian Independent Booksellers. Recipient of a Creative Victoria grant for her work on the novel, Lia travelled regularly to the centre of Australia to research and write The Crying Place, set partly in Pitjantjatjara country. As part of the process, Lia stayed in Aboriginal communities and began learning the Pitjantjatjara language.

In 2019, Lia received a Creative Victoria Creators Fund grant to work on her critically-acclaimed novel, The Desert Knows Her Name (Affirm Press, 2024). Set in the Wimmera, it is the story of a young girl who walks barefoot out of the desert, and the response to her emergence in the local community and beyond. The novel explores the erasure and re-emergence of voices, both human and nonhuman, and the silences that persist in contemporary Australia. The first draft was narrated, using voice-recognition software, over a two-week period in an abandoned farmhouse on the edge of the desert. During the writing of The Desert Knows Her Name, Lia engaged regularly with the Barengi Gadgin Land Council, the representative body of the traditional custodians of the Country on which the novel is set.

Follow Affirm Press on Twitter and Instagram.

You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• WIN The Wrong Man by Tim Ayliffe
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Writer in residence: Kyra Geddes

Born in Adelaide as the daughter of German immigrants, Kyra Geddes spent her infancy in the South Australian opal fields before moving to Sydney. Following a successful career in marketing, Kyra returned to university to study English and pursue her life-long dream of writing, publishing two short stories and earning the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Academic Excellence. The Story Thief is her debut novel, and the culmination of almost a decade of research and writing. When not at her desk, Kyra can often be found visiting one of Sydney's many art galleries or daydreaming about future travel with her husband and two children.

Follow Kyra on Instagram.

Follow Affirm Press on Twitter and Instagram.

You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• The Richell Prize
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Guest in residence: Vanessa Radnidge

Vanessa Radnidge is the Head of Narrative Non-Fiction and Head of Literary at Hachette and her passion is for connecting great storytellers and great stories with readers. She began her publishing career at the Law Book Company. She worked at HarperCollins as an editor and acquisitions editor before joining the team at Hachette Australia. At Hachette, she has published fiction and non-fiction and is very proud to have worked with Favel Parrett, Mark Brandi, Stephanie Bishop, Brooke Davis, Catherine Therese, Deng Adut, Michael Brissenden, Madonna King, Hilde Hinton, Miranda Tapsell, Sean Doherty, Future D. Fidel and Connie and Samuel Johnson to name just a few.

Follow Hachette Australia Books on Twitter and Instagram.

You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• June Sale
• Sarah Speedie on her new dream career as a picture book author
• WIN Death in the Air by Ram Murali
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Writer in residence: Michael Brissenden

Michael Brissenden is an author and journalist. His first book of fiction – The List was published in 2017. A second thriller – Dead Letters also features the Federal investigator Sidney Allen and was published by Hachette Australia Books in March 2021. His latest novel, Smoke, is out now.

Michael was a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for 35 years. He was posted to Moscow, Brussels and Washington and worked in Canberra for many years in various roles – including as the Political Editor for the daily television current affairs program – The 7.30 Report, as the ABC’s defence and security correspondent and as the presenter of the ‘AM’ Current Affairs program on ABC radio. From 2017 to 2021 he was a reporter with the ABC’s investigative television documentary program – Four Corners.

Follow Michael on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Affirm Press on Twitter and Instagram.

You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• June Sale
• WIN The Bookshop Woman by Nanako Hanada
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Writer in residence: Pamela Freeman

Pamela Freeman is an award-winning, bestselling author of more than 40 books and novellas, plus short stories and scripts.

She writes under two names: Pamela Freeman for children’s and fantasy, and Pamela Hart for mystery novels and historical fiction.

Her most recent novel as Pamela Hart is An A-List for Death. This follows Digging Up Dirt, the first in the Poppy McGowan mystery series. She also publishes Regency romance novellas with Escape Publishing. Prior to this, she’s published a number of historical novels, mostly set in the first part of the 20th century (WWI and the Roaring Twenties).

As Pamela Freeman, her non-fiction picture books are multi-award winners, especially those she has created with illustrator Liz Anelli, Desert Lake and Dry to Dry: The Seasons of Kakadu. Pamela is also well known for her children’s fantasy, such as Victor’s Quest and Victor’s Challenge, and the associated Princess Betony books.

Pamela writes fantasy for adults as well; her Castings Trilogy was published world-wide and was followed by Ember and Ash, an Aurealis Award winner.

Pamela started writing as a scriptwriter for ABC Kids. She has a Doctorate in Creative Arts (Writing) and has taught writing at UTS and the University of Sydney, as well as conducting workshops at writers festivals, schools, and libraries Australia-wide. She is Director of Creative Writing at the Australian Writers' Centre.

Follow Pamela on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Hachette Australia Books on Twitter and Instagram.

Illustrator in residence: Liz Anelli

Liz was born in Essex, England and has been scribbling away since she could first hold a pencil. Liz began by lying under the dining-room table and drawing endless epic horse adventures. Now Liz generally works at a desk – but sometimes she draws the view looking down from something very tall, or sitting on a train or out for a coffee. Liz has stacks of sketchbooks packed with drawings, plane tickets, receipts and food wrappers with interesting type on them, jumbled between jotted down snatches of conversation. All this stuff is very handy for Liz's multi-media illustrations. Liz mostly uses a computer to put all the bits together. Mostly Liz illustrates picture books. Liz's latest sketches, projects and discoveries can be found (sometimes on her blog) and always on Instagram.

You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• WIN Blackwater by Jacqueline Ross
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Writer in residence: B.M. Carroll

Ber Carroll (also known as B.M Carroll) was born in Blarney, a small but famous village in Ireland. The third child of six, she often retreated from the chaos of family life by immersing herself in books. She has fond memories of the mobile library bus that used to pull up outside their house in Blarney and the dozen or so books she would borrow at a time, some quite inappropriate for her age.

Ber moved to Sydney in 1995 with her boyfriend (now husband) Rob. She got a job as a finance manager in the IT industry and began to climb the corporate ladder. The exciting and dynamic work environment captured her imagination and inspired her first novel. When Executive Affair was published, Ber flatly denied it was in any way auto-biographical. She now admits that the novel did have a lot of her in it, and suspects that half the people who purchased the book were her ex colleagues, to see if they were in it too. Ber gave up her finance career when she realised that she couldn’t hold down a demanding job, be mum to two small children and write books to contractual deadline. She now writes fulltime, but says that she misses getting dressed up for work and being around people who listen to what she has to say, unlike her kids!

Ber is the author of eleven novels. Her most recent novels The Missing Pieces of Sophie McCarthy, Who We Were, You Had It Coming, and The Other Side of Her are published under B.M. Carroll. You Had It Coming was shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction and the 2022 Davitt Award for Best Adult Novel.

You can listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or add the podcast RSS feed manually to your favourite podcast app.  

Links mentioned in this episode

• FOCUS ON… Chapters
• WIN The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins
• Buy So You Want to be a Writer – the book!
• Facebook group for So You Want to be a Writer

Writer in residence: Amy Hutton

Amy Hutton is an award-winning television producer and writer of contemporary romance, living on Sydney’s Northern Beaches with a rescue dog named Buffy. Her short stories, ‘Love is the Icing' and ‘Hot Like Chocolate', feature in the 2020 and 2021 Romance Writers of Australia Sweet Treats anthologies. When not plotting delicious romantic trials for her characters, Amy is an enthusiastic traveller, an animal advocate, a Disneyland aficionado, and a lover of tattoos.