More Crimes for a Summer Christmas

1940- Born in the UK, Stephen Knight came to Australia when he was appointed Teaching Fellow at the University of Sydney in 1963, then lecturer in English the following the year.  He went on to hold senior positions at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne, before returning to England in 1992 to take up a chair at De Montford University, Leicester. As well as numerous scholarly works in the area of medieval English literature, Knight's long held interest in crime fiction led him to him editing several anthologies of Australian crime stories. He was awarded the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Marion Halligan is an award-winning novelist, essayist and short story writer. She has been shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and the Nita B. Kibble. She has also received the Age Book of the Year, the ACT Book of the Year, the Nita B. Kibble Award, the Steele Rudd Award, the Braille Book of the Year, the 3M Talking Book of the Year, and the Geraldine Pascall prize for critical writing. The Fog Garden was shortlisted in the Queensland Premier's Literary Award. The Point, her latest novel, was shortlisted The Courier Mail Book of the Year Award.

Gary Disher was born in 1949 and grew up on his parents' farm in South Australia. He gained post graduate degrees from Adelaide and Melbourne Universities. In 1978 he was awarded a creative writing fellowship to Stanford University, where he wrote his first short story collection. He travelled widely overseas, before returning to Australia, where he taught creative writing, finally becoming a full time writer in 1988. He has written more than 40 titles, including general and crime fiction, children's books, textbooks, and books about the craft of writing.

Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne in 1942, but her family moved to Brisbane when she was a child.  She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France, and the United States.  Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) where it won an "Atlantic First" citation in 1978.  Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in 1977) won Canada's Seal Award (a $50,000 prize) in 1982.  She lived for many years in Canada, and in 1986 she was listed by the Toronto Globe & Mail as one of Canada's "Ten Best Young Fiction Writers".  Since then she has won a number of prizes for her seven novels and three short story collections, and her work has been published in twelve languages.  Three of her short stories appeared in Britian's annual Best Short Stories in English in their year of publication and one of these, "Unperformed Experiments Have No Results", was selected for The Best of the Best, an anthology of the decade in 1995. Her novel Oyster was a finalist for the Miles Franklin Award, the National Book Council Banjo Award and Canada's Trillium Award.  It was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year", and one of the Observer's Best Books of the Year in the UK. Due Preparations for the Plague won the Queensland Premier's Award for Fiction and the Davitt Award for "Best Crime Novel by an Australian woman in 2003".  It was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Christiana Stead Award for Fiction. In 2003 Janette Turner Hospital received the Patrick White Award for lifetime literary achievement. Janette Turner Hospital holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of South Carolina.

Peter Corris was born in Stawell, Victoria in 1942. When he was five his family left the country for Melbourne and he was educated at Melbourne High School and the University of Melbourne. After taking a Master's degree at Monash University and a PhD at the Australian National University (both in History), he was an academic, teaching and researching in various universities and a College of Advanced Education until 1975 when he gave up academia for journalism. He was literary editor of The National Times, 1980-81. He has travelled and lived for short periods in the Pacific, Britain, Europe and the USA. 

Kerry Greenwood was born in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray and after wandering far and wide, she returned to live there. She has a degree in English and Law from Melbourne University and was admitted to the legal profession on the 1st April 1982, a day which she finds both soothing and significant. Kerry has written twenty novels, a number of plays, including The Troubadours with Stephen D'Arcy, is an award-winning children's writer and has edited and contributed to several anthologies. In 1996 she published a book of essays on female murderers called Things She Loves: Why women Kill. The Phryne Fisher series (pronounced Fry-knee, to rhyme with briny) began in 1989 with Cocaine Blues which was a great success. Kerry has written fifteen books in this series with no sign yet of Miss Fisher hanging up her pearl-handled pistol. Kerry says that as long as people want to read them, she can keep writing them. Kerry Greenwood has worked as a folk singer, factory hand, director, producer, translator, costume-maker, cook and is currently a solicitor. When she is not writing, she works as a locum solicitor for the Victorian Legal Aid. She is also the unpaid curator of seven thousand books, three cats (Attila, Belladonna and Ashe) and a computer called Apple (which squeaks). She embroiders very well but cannot knit. She has flown planes and leapt out of them (with a parachute) in an attempt to cure her fear of heights (she is now terrified of jumping out of planes but can climb ladders without fear). She can detect second-hand bookshops from blocks away and is often found within them. For fun Kerry reads science fiction/fantasy and detective stories. She is not married, has no children and lives with a registered wizard. When she is not doing any of the above she stares blankly out of the window.

Marele Day grew up in Sydney and graduated from Sydney University with BA (Hons). Her work experience ranges from fruit picking to academic teaching, and she has worked as a freelance editor. She has travelled extensively and lived in Italy, France and Ireland. Travels include a voyage by yacht from Cairns to Singapore which resulted in near shipwreck in the Java Sea.  She now resides on the New South Wales north coast.

Martin Long's career has reflected his two main interests - writing and music. He studied at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music and the University of Sydney before becoming a journalist - a music and film critic, feature writer, features editor and leader writer. He has pursued musicological studies as a hobby and has published work on Elizabethan and Jacobean music.

Jennifer Rowe was born in Sydney, Australia. She obtained a M.A. in English Literature at the University of Sydney. She worked as assistant editor at Paul Hamlyn. She later worked at Angus and Robertson Publishers where she remained for fourteen years, first as editor and finally as publisher. She also writes children's books under the pseudonym 'Emily Rodda'.

Susan Geason was born in Tasmania, grew up largely in Queensland, and now lives in Sydney. She has a BA in History and Politics from the University of Queensland and a Masters Degree in political theory from the University of Toronto, Canada, where she lived for some years. She is the author of the series of cult novels about PI Syd Fish, set in Kings Cross/Darlinghurst in Sydney. She has also written Wildfire, a psychological thriller with a female protagonist. These mysteries have been published in French and German.

Robert Hood was born on the 24th of July, 1951, in Rydalmere, NSW. He attended Rydalmere Primary School, and then -- when his family moved to Sydney's northern beaches in the 1960s -- Collaroy Plateau Primary School. By the time he reached high school, he had developed a taste for weird movies. In his first year at Narrabeen Boys' High School, he wrote an assignment on H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. He became obsessed with science fiction and fantasy stories, but read anything he could get his hands on. It's said that his classroom compositions became progressively longer and weirder. 

She had no idea how popular Carol would become. She thought she had written a stand-alone mystery novel. Carol, the publisher, and the public had other ideas. The sixteenth Carol Ashton mystery will be published at the end of 2004. Apart from writing, Clair McNab teaches not-yet-published writers through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

Steve Wright was born in London and now lives in Coledale, NSW. He has written full-time for television, film and the stage since 1983.

Kelvin Barry "Kel" Richards is an Australian author, journalist, radio personality and lay Christian. Richards has written a series of crime novels and thrillers for adult readers which includes The Case of the Vanishing Corpse, Death in Egypt and An Outbreak of Darkness.