Vahida Berberovic is a storyteller who teaches English and Communications at UTS Sydney. She is a refugee from Bosnia, and her writing investigates big themes in the small detail of the lives of people like herself. She has written two novels, two novellas and several short stories. She has been awarded an international writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center and a writing residency at the Varuna Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains.

In 2024, Vahida won the inaugural WestWords Prize with her winning manuscript, Piggy Tails, selected for publication by WestWords Books. Read more about Vahida, and the WestWords prize, here. 

Alexandria (Ally) Burnham is an AWGIE award-winning screenwriter, novelist and writer of comics.  A NIDA graduate (2016, Masters, Writing for Performance), she is best known for her feature film Unsound (Apple, 2020), which was nominated for best original feature at the 2020 AWGIE (Australian Writers Guild) awards. A romantic-drama, the film won best Australian feature at the 2020 Melbourne Queer Film Festival and best fiction feature film at the 2020 ATOM Awards.

Ally is also the lead writer for Metropius (2021), a multi-media story world told across animation, comic books and board games, produced by 18 Degrees. Her screenplay won Most Outstanding Animation at the 2022 AWGIE Awards. Her comic book series, Forgotten Rose, is set in the same universe. When there is time, she also teaches at NIDA Open, course designing and training school-aged and adult students in screenwriting for film and television. She is also featured regularly on the writing podcast Prose and Cons. For more information, visit her website.

Jelena Curic is a writer of literary fiction, crime and comedy. Along with writing novels, short stories and comedy pieces, she is also the resident Diva in the Croatian community singing most weekends. A 2023 WestWords Academy Alumni, her stories can be found in WestWords Bad Western Sydney Anthology, Bad Western Sydney. The Second Case, Living Stories The Other City, where she won the Hills District, Short Stories Unlimited Leaving Home Anthology and she was short-listed for the Born Writers Award 2023 and 2024.

In 2024, she read her memoir piece Anna’s Rosary at Bravewords Live True Stories Told Well. She was also on the Panel at BAD Crime Festival 2024, alongside Candice Fox and Dinuka McKenzie, reading her story ‘Even Crooks Need a Crook Lock.’ She was accepted into the WestWords Accelerator program supported by City of Parramatta Council, where she developed her debut manuscript Sing to Me.

Margaret Hamilton was active in many aspects of children’s literature, as librarian, editor, reviewer, bookseller and publisher. In 1987 she represented Australian publishers in the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) cultural delegation to China. The following year she established a publishing house for children’s books, Margaret Hamilton Books. A long-serving member of the CBCA, she was National President, convened the first National Conference, and established the Awards Foundation to help raise money for the Book of the Year Awards.

Samantha W. L. Lee is a Chinese-Australian writer of literary fiction, essays and poetry. She was shortlisted for the WestWords/Ultimo Prize for her manuscript and completed the WestWords Fellowship in 2023. Samantha has been shortlisted for multiple Needle in the Hay flash fiction competitions and has been published in SBS Voices and FemAsia Magazine.

Paris Rosemont is an award-winning asian-australian poet. Her poetry has found eclectic homes, from international literary journals and anthologies, through to quirky underground zines. Her niche is theatrical performance poetry. Her debut collection, Banana Girl, was shortlisted for the Dame Mary Gilmore Award 2024. Her second poetry collection, Barefoot Poetess, reclaims the word Poetess, and reclaims a woman’s fierce allegiance to her body, sexuality, her selfhood.

Pete Shmigel is a Western Sydney based writer. He is the son of Ukrainian refugees from World War 2. He has had a 30-year-long career in politics, business, the NGO sector and journalism. He is a former CEO of Lifeline Australia and initiator of Lifeline Ukraine. Pete is the founder of Revolve ReCYCLING, a social enterprise that gives refurbished bicycles to disadvantaged children, including Ukrainian refugee and Indigenous children.

Garth Thomas spent 35 years at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation working in news and current affairs (winning several awards including an Ellie Award), but now in retirement wants to tell his own stories. He resides in Carlingford, New South Wales, with no dogs, no cats, no goldfish, but two wonderful daughters who have come to appreciate spooky old movies starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi … much in the same spirit (pun intended) as The World of Alison Tuesday.