R. JOHNS has a First-Class Honours Drama degree (Manchester University). Her work has been presented at Women International Playwrights curated conferences in Cape Town, Stockholm, Athens and Mumbai. Her plays have been produced in Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. Her political thriller Black Box 149 was part of DFAT’s Australia now Germany program. It was the first time the Staatstheater Nürnberg has produced a play by an Australian playwright. As Told by the Boys Who Fed Me Apples (VCE Drama playlist), supported by an Anzac Centenary Arts and Culture Fund grant, was nominated for an AWGIE Award for Community and Youth theatre. Johns has been shortlisted for the Griffin Playwriting Award and the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition. At the Centre of Light had an extract published in Family, Scenes from a Diverse World (USA). The sell-out play Stray was on the VCE Drama playlist and produced for radio. Tchekov at the House of Special Purpose was inspired by the writer’s trip to the Winter Palace, St Petersburg. Carrying Shoes into the Unknown (VCE Theatre Studies playlist) set in Iran, published Currency Press, has an excerpt in Contemporary Monologues for Young Men and Women: Volume II (Oberon Books, UK).

DIANE STUBBINGS is a writer and reviewer. Her plays include The Parricide, The Possibility of Zero, These are the Things, Void, Entangled, The Annotations, Darkwater and Willowdene. Stubbings’ work has been four times shortlisted for the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights’ Award and three times longlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award. She is the recipient of an RE Ross Trust Development Award, and a Grace Marion Wilson Fellowship. Her plays have also been shortlisted for the Griffin Award, and the Internationalists’ Global Playwriting Competition, and longlisted for the Theatre 503 (UK) Playwriting Award. Stubbings’ fiction reviews have appeared in The Australian, The Canberra Times and the Sydney Review of Books. She has written essays for Sydney Theatre Company programs, and published a work of literary criticism. Stubbings is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts.