Tasmanian Gothic

Thea Beatrice May Astley (25 August 1925 – 17 August 2004) was an Australian novelist and short story writer. She was a prolific writer who was published for over 40 years from 1958. At the time of her death, she had won more Miles Franklin Awards, Australia's major literary award, than any other writer. As well as being a writer, she taught at all levels of education – primary, secondary and tertiary.

Astley has a significant place in Australian letters as she was "the only woman novelist of her generation to have won early success and published consistently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when the literary world was heavily male-dominated".

Born in Brisbane and educated at All Hallows' School, Astley studied arts at the University of Queensland then trained to become a teacher. After marrying Jack Gregson in 1948, she moved to Sydney where she taught at various high schools, as well as kept up with her writing. She tutored at Macquarie University from 1968 to 1980, before retiring to write full-time, at which time she and her husband moved to Kuranda in North Queensland. In the late 1980s they moved to Nowra, New South Wales, on the state's south coast, and, after her husband's death in 2003, she moved to Byron Bay to be near her only child, Ed Gregson, a musician and television producer.

Robert Duncan Drewe is an Australian novelist, non-fiction and short story writer.

Timothy John Winton (born 4 August 1960) is an Australian writer. He has written novels, children's books, non-fiction books, and short stories. In 1997, he was named a Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia, and has won the Miles Franklin Award four times.

Timothy John Winton was born on 4 August 1960 in Subiaco, an inner western suburb of Perth, Western Australia. He grew up in the northern Perth suburb of Karrinyup, before he moved with his family to the regional city of Albany at the age of 12.

Whilst at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, Winton wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, which won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1981, launching his writing career. He has stated that he wrote "the best part of three books while at university". His second book, Shallows, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1984. Winton published Cloudstreet in 1991, which properly established his writing career. He has continued to publish fiction, plays and non-fiction material.

Raimond Gaita is a German-born Australian philosopher and award-winning writer. He was, until 2011, foundation professor of philosophy at the Australian Catholic University and professor of moral philosophy at King's College London. He is currently professorial fellow in the Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne and emeritus professor of moral philosophy at King's College London. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Helen Garner is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977, immediately established her as an original voice on the Australian literary scene—it is now widely considered a classic. She has a reputation for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her widespread attention, particularly with her novels, Monkey Grip and The Spare Room (2008).

Nikki Gemmell (born 1966) is a best-selling Australian author. She resides in Sydney, Australia.

Gemmell is the author of fourteen works of fiction and seven non-fiction books. Her books have been translated into 22 languages.

Nikki was born in Wollongong, New South Wales and attended Kincoppal School, Sydney on a scholarship. She graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney with a Masters in Writing and worked as a radio journalist for ABC Radio and the BBC World Service.

Her distinctive writing style, including her use of the second-person narrative, has gained her critical and popular acclaim. In France she has been described as a "female Jack Kerouac". In 2007, the French literary magazine Lire included her in a list of what it called the fifty most important writers in the world – those it believed would have a significant influence on the literature of the 21st century.

David George Joseph Malouf AO (mah-LOOF; born 20 March 1934) is an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright and librettist. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008, Malouf has lectured at both the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney. He also delivered the 1998 Boyer Lectures.

Malouf's 1974 collection Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. His 1990 novel The Great World won numerous awards, including the 1991 Miles Franklin Award and Prix Femina Étranger His 1993 novel Remembering Babylon was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 1994 Prix Femina Étranger, the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the 1995 Prix Baudelaire and the 1996 International Dublin Literary Award. Malouf was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, the Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008 and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2016. He has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Andrew McGahan (10 October 1966 – 1 February 2019) was an Australian novelist, best known for his first novel Praise, and for his Miles Franklin Award-winning novel The White Earth. His novel Praise is considered to be part of the Australian literary genre of grunge lit.

Born in Dalby, Queensland, McGahan was the ninth of ten children and grew up on a wheat farm. His schooling was at St Columba's and St Mary's colleges in Dalby, and then Marist College Ashgrove in Brisbane. He commenced an Arts degree at the University of Queensland, but dropped out halfway through, in 1985, to return to the family farm, and to commence his first novel – which was never published. He then spent the next few years working in a variety of jobs, until 1991, when he wrote his first published novel, Praise.

Catherine Elizabeth Grenville (born 1950) is an Australian author. She has published fifteen books, including fiction, non-fiction, biography, and books about the writing process. In 2001, she won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection, and in 2006 she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Secret River. The Secret River was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Her novels have been published worldwide and have been translated into many languages. Three have been adapted into feature films. The Secret River was adapted for the stage by Andrew Bovell and toured by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2019.

Kate Grenville was born in 1950, one of three children born to Kenneth Grenville Gee, a District Court judge and barrister; and Isobel Russell, a pharmacist. She was educated at Cremorne Girls High School, the University of Sydney (BA Hons) and the University of Colorado (MA). After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney, Grenville worked in the film industry, mostly editing documentaries at Film Australia. She has also been a teacher of creative writing. Between 1976 and 1980 she lived in London and Paris, and wrote fiction while supporting herself by doing film-editing, writing, and secretarial jobs. In 1980 she went to the University of Colorado at Boulder to do a master's degree in creative writing. She returned to Australia in 1983 and became a sub-editor at SBS Television in the subtitling department. She won a literary grant in 1986 and left SBS to pursue her writing. Since the early 1990s she has been an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney.

Steven Carroll (born 1949) is an Australian novelist. He was born in Melbourne, Victoria and studied at La Trobe University. He has taught English at secondary school level, and drama at RMIT. He has been Drama Critic for The Sunday Age newspaper in Melbourne.

Steven Carroll is now a full-time writer living in Melbourne with his partner, the writer Fiona Capp, and their son. As of 2019, he also writes the non-fiction book review column for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Charlotte Wood (born 1965) is an Australian novelist. The Australian newspaper described Wood as "one of our [Australia's] most original and provocative writers".

Wood was born in Cooma, New South Wales. She is the author of six novels – Pieces of a Girl (1999), The Submerged Cathedral (2004), The Children (2007), Animal People (2011), The Natural Way of Things (2015) and The Weekend (2019). She has also written a collection of interviews with Australian writers, The Writer's Room (2016), a collection of personal reflections on cooking, Love & Hunger (2012). She was also editor of an anthology of writing about siblings, Brothers & Sisters (2009).

Her books have been critically well received and frequently mentioned in prize lists. In 2016 The Natural Way of Things won the Stella Prize, the Indie Book Awards Novel of the Year and Book of the Year, and was short-listed for various other prizes including the Miles Franklin and Barbara Jefferis. Animal People was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2013 and longlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award. She has a background in journalism and has also taught writing at a variety of levels.

Carrie Tiffany is an English-born Australian novelist and former park ranger.

Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO (4 June 1923 – 13 February 2007) was an English-born Australian writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s and forged an illustrious literary career there. She was 53 when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well-known writers such as Tim Winton among her students at Curtin University.

Her novels explore "alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment."

Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is a prolific Australian novelist, playwright, and essayist. He is best known for his non-fiction novel Schindler's Ark, the story of Oskar Schindler's rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, which won the Booker Prize in 1982. The book would later be adapted into director Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Both Keneally's parents (Edmund Thomas Keneally and Elsie Margaret Coyle) were born to Irish fathers in the timber and dairy town of Kempsey, New South Wales, and, though born in Sydney, his early years were also spent in Kempsey. His father, Edmund Thomas Keneally, flew for the Royal Australian Air Force in World War II, then returned to work in a small business in Sydney. By 1942, the family had moved to 7 Loftus Crescent, Homebush, a suburb in the inner west of Sydney and Keneally was enrolled at Christian Brothers St Patrick's College, Strathfield. Shortly after, his brother John was born. Keneally studied Honours English for his Leaving Certificate in 1952, under Brother James Athanasius McGlade, and won a Commonwealth scholarship.

Peter Goldsworthy AM (born 12 October 1951) is an Australian writer and medical practitioner. He has won awards for his short stories, poetry, novels, and opera libretti.

Goldsworthy has been described in A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry as "one of the most skilled and satisfying poets in Australia".

Goldsworthy was born in Minlaton, South Australia, and grew up in various Australian country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin in the Northern Territory. He graduated in medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1974, and worked in alcohol and drug rehabilitation for several years, but, with his poetry being published in Westerly and the Friendly Street Poetry Reader, he started dividing his working time equally between general practice and writing.

Rosina Ruth Lucia Park AM was a New Zealand–born Australian author. Her best known works are the novels The Harp in the South (1948) and Playing Beatie Bow (1980), and the children's radio serial The Muddle-Headed Wombat (1951–1970), which also spawned a book series (1962–1982).