Better Off Said: Eulogies for the Living and Dead

Authors

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  Kaliane Bradley

  Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor. Her debut novel, The Ministry of Time, was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, was named one of the Observer’s best new novels for 2024, and has sold in 27 languages. The novel has been shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize (among other prizes) and was the Dymocks Book of the Year. She won the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize and the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize. She works in publishing and lives in London with her husband.
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  A. C. Grayling

  A. C. Grayling CBE MA DPhil (Oxon) FRSA FRSL is the Principal of Northeastern University London, and its Professor of Philosophy. He is also a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He is the author of over thirty books of philosophy, biography, history of ideas, and essays. He has contributed to many leading newspapers in the UK, US and Australia, and to BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service, for which he did the annual 'Exchanges at the Frontier' series. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Vice President of Humanists UK, Patron of the Defence Humanists, Honorary Associate of the Secular Society, and a Patron of Dignity in Dying.
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  Eliza Hull

  Eliza Hull's profile as a musician, writer and advocate has risen exponentially in Australia. Highlights include speaking at SXSW Sydney, performing at BIGSOUND, The Women in Music Awards and performing live on the BBC in the UK and ABC. She also recently toured the U.K. across five weeks, including a lucrative place on The Great Escape Festival’s program in Brighton. She is the editor and creator of the book We've Got This about parenting with a disability and has written two children's books Come Over To My House and The World We Can Build which features disability representation.
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  Emilie Zoey Baker

  Emilie Zoey Baker is an award-winning Australian poet and spoken-word performer who has toured nationally and internationally performing and writing. She was a Fellow at the State Library of Victoria, and has previously been poet-in-residence for Museums Victoria and coordinator for the National Australian Poetry Slam. She teaches poetry and slam in primary and secondary schools and is the creative director of OutLoud Australian Poetry’s first youth slam. She is also the host and co-producer of the monthly spoken word event Better Off Said with Marieke Hardy.
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  Gideon Haigh

  Gideon Haigh has published more than fifty books and contributed to more than a hundred newspapers and magazines in a decades-long journalism career. His cricket books include The Cricket War, The Summer Game and On Warne, and he has written on subjects from abortion, asbestos and architecture to incest and HV Evatt. The Office: A Hardworking History won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and Certain Admissions won a Ned Kelly Prize for true crime. In his most recent and highly acclaimed book, My Brother Jaz, published by Melbourne University Publishing, Gideon Haigh uncharacteristally writes about his own life and that of his brother Jaz, who tragically died in 1987 in a car accident at the age of seventeen. After thirty-seven years and multiple attempts at writing about his life’s greatest loss, Gideon wrote My Brother Jaz in seventy-two hours, at a time of personal crisis in January. Hailed as a "masterpiece" by The Age, My Brother Jaz is a courageous and honest examination of memory, loss and grief.
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  Marcia Langton

  Professor Marcia Langton AO, anthropologist, geographer, academic and public intellectual, is a descendant of the Yiman and Bidjara nations of Queensland. Since 2000 she has been Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, where she is Associate Provost.
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  Marieke Hardy

  Marieke Hardy is a curator, screenwriter, artist, and producer. She has penned columns for The Age, The Drum, and Frankie magazine, and written for many television shows, including Laid, Barons, The Family Law, Heartbreak High, and Seven Types of Ambiguity. She was co-curator of international literary salon Women of Letters and a regular panelist on the ABC's Book Club for 11 years. She is a recipient of the 2015 Sidney Myer Fellowship and currently co-curates monthly spoken word event Better Off Said.
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  Samah Sabawi

  Dr Samah Sabawi is an award-winning playwright, author and poet, born in the besieged and occupied Gaza, living and working on the stolen land of the Bunurong Boon Wurrung and Wurundjerie Woi Wurrung peoples. Sabawi’s work and voice reflect those of a growing community of researchers and writers from indigenous and marginalised backgrounds, who recognise the inseparable links between western academia and knowledge production, and the ideologies and practices of colonialism.
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  Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts

  Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts is a proud Bundjalung Widubul-Wiabul woman, who has degrees in both law and social work, and was recognised with an Australian Human Rights Medal in 2019. She is a human rights lawyer and Fulbright scholar whose current research is focused on unveiling the intersections of human rights, child removal and the implications of forcible removal, ensuring that First Nations child survivors and those impacted are heard, while providing solutions towards ending child removal. In 2024, Vanessa was appointed the inaugural Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People Commissioner for the Australian Capital Territory. Her memoir is Long Yarn Short.

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