Stefan Laszczuk won the Australian Vogel Award in 2007. He also won the 2004 SA Premier’s Literary award for best unpublished manuscript. As a result he has published two novels: I Dream of Magda (Allen & Unwin, 2008), and The Goddamn Bus of Happiness (Wakefield Press, 2004). He has also published a book of short stories, The New Cage. He has a PhD in Creative Writing, and is currently working for the ABC in Canberra.
Heather Taylor-Johnson is an American-born, multi-form writer, living and working on Kaurna land near Port Adelaide. She's the author of five poetry collections and a verse novel. The anthology she edited, Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of chronic illness and pain, is read in disability circles around the world. Her essays have won Island's Nonfiction Prize and been shortlisted for the Australian Book Review's Calibre Prize, while her second novel, Jean Harley was Here, was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Fiction. She's an arts critic, mentor and assessor, and runs a modest writers' retreat in the Fleurieu Peninsula. She's an Adjunct Researcher at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, where she received her PhD in Creative Writing.