Shveta Thakrar was one of the inaugural Walter Dean Myers grant recipients of 2015 and has been a shining mainstay in fantasy.

She has had fiction published in Uncanny Magazine, Faerie Magazine, and the YA anthologies Toil & Trouble and A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. Star Daughter is her first novel.

Margo Lanagan is an acclaimed writer of novels and short stories. Black Juice was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and won two World Fantasy Awards and the Victorian Premier's Award for Young Adult Fiction.

Red Spikes won the CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Horn Book Fanfare title, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

Her novel Tender Morsels won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was an Honor Book in the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.

Her novel Sea Hearts was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and won a WA Premiers Book Award, the CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers, The Norma K Hemming Award and the Barbara Jefferis Award, an Indie Award and an Aurealis Award among many other honours.

Zeroes, and its sequel Swarm, co-authored with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti, were New York Times bestsellers.

Jane Yolen is the author of more than 300 books, including children's classics such as Owl Moon and The Devi's Arithmetic, and adult novels such as Sister Light, Sister Dark. Her books and stories have won the Nebula Award, the Caldecott Medal, the National Jewish Book Award, and many other awards and accolades. She divides her time between Massachusetts and St. Andrews, Scotland.