Ghosted: Bryan Washington and Christos Tsiolkas

Maeve Marsden is the Creative Director of Varuna the National Writers' House and the Blue Mountains Writers Festival. A writer and theatremaker, she is perhaps best known for producing LGBTQI+ storytelling project Queerstories for the last 8 years.

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of eight novels, including Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head-On, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award, as well as being made into a feature film. His fourth novel, the international bestseller The Slap, won Overall Best Book in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009, was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award, longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize and won the Australian Literary Society Gold, as well as the 2009 Australian Booksellers Association and Australian Book Industry Awards Books of the Year. Christos's fifth novel, Barracuda, was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and the inaugural Voss Literary Prize. The Slap and Barracuda were both adapted into celebrated television series. Christos's acclaimed collection of short stories, Merciless Gods, was published in 2014 and his critical literary study On Patrick White came out in 2018. His sixth novel, Damascus, was published in 2019 and won the 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction. 7½ was published in 2021 and won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Christos is also a playwright, essayist and screen writer. He lives in Melbourne.

Bryan Washington is the author of Family Meal, Memorial and Lot. He is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a National Book Critics Circle Fiction and Joyce Carol Oates Prize finalist, and the recipient of the Dylan Thomas Prize, a Lambda Literary Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award.