Trudi Canavan is a bestselling Australian writer of fantasy novels, who has been making up stories about people and places that don’t exist for as long as she can remember. While establishing her writing career, she worked as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer, and is best known for her bestselling fantasy trilogies The Black Magician and Age of the Five. The third book in her The Traitor Spy trilogy, The Traitor Queen, reached #1 on the UK Times Hardback bestseller list in 2011, while The Magician’s Apprentice, the prequel to The Black Magician trilogy, won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2009. Subsequently, Canavan has created a new fantasy adventure series called Millennium's Rule, with a completely new setting comprising multiple worlds which characters can cross between. This has also been a success, with Thief's Magic a joint Ditmar winner for Best Novel of 2015 and the first three books reaching bestseller status. Trudi Canavan lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Grant Cartwright is an award-winning actor who has performed extensively in Australia with the Melbourne Theatre Company, Sydney Theatre Company, Malthouse Theatre, La Mama Theatre and many others. A 2005 graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Grant returned from New York where he performed with the Manhattan Repertory Theatre and the 45th Street Theater. He frequently lends his voice to many international film productions for English Language dubbing, and among his screen credits is the HBO mini-series The Pacific.
Hannah’s one-woman show My Name is Rachel Corrie was nominated for both the Adelaide Critics’ Circle and Green Room Awards 2010, and won the Adelaide Theatre Guild’s ‘Curtain Call’ Award for Best Female Performance in 2010. In 2009 she was awarded Best Theatre Performance for her role in After the End. Her theatre credits include: Actors at Work (Bell Shakespeare), Goodbye Ruby Tuesday (Melbourne International Comedy Festival), The Red and the Black (Stork Theatre), Been So Long (Adelaide Fringe 2006), Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Australian Shakespeare Company). 2012 saw Hannah starting the year touring Australia in David Williamson’s Let the Sunshine.