Creme de la Phlegm

Melinda Harvey is a book critic who has written for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines since 2004. She has been a Walkley Awards finalist for her criticism and has served as on the judging panels of the Miles Franklin Literary Award (2017-2021) and Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize (2021-2022). She co-coordinates the Stella Count, which assesses the extent of gender bias in Australia’s book pages annually. 

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from southwest New South Wales. Her poetry, short stories, critique, and essays have been published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Overland and the Sydney Review of Books. Leane was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Poetry and the Red Room Poetry Fellowship. In 2020, she edited Guwayu – for all times, a collection of First Nations poetry.  

Catriona Menzies-Pike has been the editor of the Sydney Review of Books since 2015. She is the author of a book about running, The Long Run, and numerous essays about literature, culture and feminism. 

Caroline Overington is the literary editor at The Weekend Australian. She is a two-time winner of the Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism, and a winner of the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Excellence in Journalism. She is the author of fifteen books, including Kickback: Inside the AWB Scandal, which won the $30,000 Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature; and Last Woman Hanged, which won the 2016 Davitt Prize. She is a judge of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in fiction and poetry, and a judge of the Vogel Prize for emerging writers.

Podcasts on Spotify
Start Worrying, Details to Follow

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic, and the recipient of ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellowship. Her literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appears in national arts publications, and is increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and The New York Times. Her award-winning short stories have been published at home and abroad, and have been selected for a number of Australian anthologies.

Podcasts on Spotify
The Aussie Queen of Noir