Joe is a longstanding LGBTIQA+ activist and CEO of Switchboard Victoria. Switchboard runs Australia’s only LGBTIQA+ dedicated family violence prevention helpline, the Rainbow Door. Joe believes in ...

Christopher Paolini was educated at home by his parents. His abiding love of fantasy and science fiction inspired him to write his debut novel, Eragon, when he graduated from high school at 15.

Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. She won the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short-story competition, the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to the Iowa Writers' ...

The Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowships are back for 2025 – this year made possible by the generous support of the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, the Readings Foundation and the Just ...

Dame Stella Rimington joined the Security Service (MI5) in 1968 and was appointed Director General in 1992, the first woman to hold the post. Her latest novel is Rip Tide. During her career, Stella ...

Thirty-year-old Christian Lander was born and raised in Toronto. After spending eight years in the ivory tower of academia (white people love graduate school), he moved to Los Angeles to work in the ...

Jamie Oliver started cooking at his parent’s pub, The Cricketers, in Clavering, Essex, at the age of eight and has since worked with some of the world’s top chefs. He is now running Fifteen - one of ...

Liao Yiwu is a Chinese poet, novelist and screenwriter currently living in exile in Germany because of government suppression of his work in China. He is the author of the epic poem ‘Massacre’, the ...

Journalist, columnist and author Thomas Friedman has been one of the world’s most influential media figures for over a decade. In his twice-weekly New York Times column he’s written widely on issues ...

Tishya Desai is a program and learning designer with a passion for using education as a tool for good. Tishya has previously worked with social enterprises and newly arrived migrants and refugees in ...

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of two novels - Everything is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) - and a work of non-fiction, Eating Animals (2009). In 2010, he ...