The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–1954), who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (1901). She bequeathed her estate to fund this award. As of 2016, the award is valued at A$60,000.
Laurence James Duggan, known as Laurie Duggan, is an Australian poet, editor, and translator.
Nerida Newton is an Australian novelist whose first novel, The Lambing Flat won the Emerging Author category for the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. In 2004 the novel was shortlisted the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Asia/Pacific region and One Book One Brisbane. Later that year, Newton was named by the Sydney Morning Herald as one of Australia's best young novelists. Her second novel, Death of a Whaler was released in 2006.
Judith Beveridge is a contemporary Australian poet, editor and academic. She is a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award.
The Barbara Jefferis Award is an Australian literary award prize. The award was created in 2007 after being endowed by John Hinde upon his death to commemorate his late wife, author Barbara Jefferis. It is funded by his $1 million bequest. Originally an annual award, it has been awarded biennially since 2012.
Sarah Holland-Batt is a contemporary Australian poet, critic, and academic.
Briony Stewart is an Australian writer and illustrator of children's books.
Kristina Olsson is an Australian writer, journalist and teacher. She is a recipient of the Barbara Jefferis Award, Queensland Literary Award, and Nita Kibble Literary Award.
Felicity Plunkett is an Australian poet, literary critic, editor and academic.
Emily Ballou is an Australian-American poet, novelist and screenwriter. Her poetry collection The Darwin Poems, a verse portrait of Charles Darwin, was published by University of Western Australia Press in 2009. It was written as part of an Australia Council for the Arts residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland.
Chris Flynn is an Australian author, editor and critic.
Heather Rose is an Australian author born in Hobart, Tasmania. She is the author of the acclaimed memoir Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here. She is best known for her novels The Museum of Modern Love, which won the 2017 Stella Prize, and Bruny (2019), which won Best General Fiction in the 2020 Australian Book Industry Awards. She has also worked in advertising, business, and the arts.
Tony Birch is an Aboriginal Australian author, academic and activist. He regularly appears on ABC local radio and Radio National shows and at writers’ festivals. He was head of the honours programme for creative writing at the University of Melbourne before becoming the first recipient of the Dr Bruce McGuinness Indigenous Research Fellowship at Victoria University in Melbourne in June 2015.
Ellen van Neerven is an Aboriginal Australian writer, educator and editor. They are queer and non-binary. Their first work of fiction, Heat and Light (2013), won several awards, and in 2019 Van Neerven won the Queensland Premier's Young Publishers and Writers Award. Their second collection of poetry, Throat (2020), won three awards at the 2021 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, including Book of the Year.
John Clanchy is an Australian novelist and short story writer.
Claire Zorn is an Australian writer of young adult fiction. She was awarded the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers in 2015 and 2017.
Jacqueline Frances Kent is an Australian journalist, biographer and non-fiction writer. She is also known as Jacquie Kent, the name she used when writing young adult fiction in the 1990s and sometimes writes as Frances Cook.
Rae White is a Brisbane-based poet and writer. White is non-binary and the founding editor of the online periodical #EnbyLife: Journal for non-binary and gender diverse creatives. White's 2017 poetry collection Milk Teeth won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was commended in the 2018 Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. Their poetry and writing has been published in the Australian Poetry Journal, Capricious, Cordite, Meanjin, Overland, and Rabbit.
Omar Sakr is a contemporary Arab-Australian poet, novelist and essayist.
Laura Elvery is an Australian author and winner of the Queensland Literary Awards' Steele Rudd Award for her short story collection Ordinary Matter.
