Conflux 8

Photo by Michael Small

Emily Rodda

Emily Rodda is one of Australia's most successful and popular authors for children and has outstanding success with her Deltora Quest and Rowan novels and more recently her Rondo series. She has won the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award (Younger Readers) a record five times and in 1995 she received the Dromkeen Medal for services to Australian children's literature. Her best-selling Deltora Quest series has sold over 10 million copies world wide, with 3 million copies distributed in Australia alone. The success of this series has been far-reaching including it being published in 32 countries and translated into 25 languages. Her latest Rondo series is a trilogy and is also proving to be extraordinarily successful. Her first book, The Key to Rondo was shortlisted for Book of Year (Younger Readers) in the Children's Book Council of Australia's 2008 Awards and the Patricia Wrightson Prize in 2008 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and was the winner for Best Children's (8-12 years) Long Fiction in the 2007 Aurealis Awards. The Wizard of Rondo was published in October 2008 and the final book in the trilogy will be The Battle of Rondo due for release in October 2009. Emily Rodda's real name Jennifer Rowe, first began writing as a small child and continued that passion by becoming involved in the book industry as an editor and publisher. She was later the editor of the Australian Women's Weekly. For the past 15 years she has been a full time writer.

Photo by Ellen Datlow

James Minz

James Minz was recently alarmed to discover that he has been working in publishing for more than fifteen years. It all began in a dark and dreary basement in Madison, Wisconsin, where he started out as a lowly slave intern for James Frenkel. By the time he left four years later, the offices had been transplanted to a bright and cheery attic (fully finished and everything). While there he worked in a wide variety of capacities--mostly as an editorial assistant, literary agent and packager of anthologies, including co-packager of the highly regarded annual The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (at least it was still Windling at that time). In September 1997, the siren song of the New York City publishing scene was simply too strong to resist, and he joined the editorial staff of Tom Doherty Associates (i.e. Tor, Forge, Orb, etc.) as David Hartwell's assistant. After several years of working on way too many books in way too small a window of time, he had accumulated enough of a list of his own authors to justify his very own job as a full Editor. Coffee, cake and scotch ensued. After they were all gone, there was nothing left to do but join the other German publishing empire, so on January 31, 2005, Herr Minz joined the editorial staff of Del Rey Books of the Random House Publishing Group (i.e. he moved from Holtzbrinck to Bertelsmann). After a couple years with the largest publishing company in the US, it was time to move on. So on the centennial of Heinlein’s birth, Minz joined Baen Books as Senior Editor. And he has been there ever since...

Authors he has worked with include Catherine Asaro, Hal Duncan, Terry Goodkind, Elizabeth Haydon, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Moon, Frederik Pohl, Robert J. Sawyer, Harry Turtledove, Jack Williamson, and Gene Wolfe, among many others. Of course, that includes a number of Antipodeans, such as John Birmingham, Stephen Dedman, Jennifer Fallon, Penelope Love, Sean McMullen, Graham Sharp Paul, Jane Routley, Lucy Sussex, not to mention a few transplants to Aus, such as Paul Brandon and Jack Dann. He also had the distinct pleasure of working on Centaurus, the US edition of Dreaming Down Under and George Turner's final novel.

For more information, here is a link to an interview.

Marc McBride

Marc McBride was educated in Northern Ireland at Bangor Grammar School. Graduating in 1990, he moved to Western Australia to study design at Curtin University.

Marc graduated in 1994; his final year project was the design and manufacture of the Dracula's Castle at Adventure World in Perth. Working as a set designer for television commercials and short films, Marc was the winner of the 1995 WA film and Video festival for Best Art Direction.  

In between his design work he painted murals for various restaurants across Asia including the Dome Cafes. He also began illustrating for magazines. This association soon led him to book illustration where he has illustrated some one hundred and fifty book covers and nine picture books. Marc has had work exhibited with the New York Society of Illustrators and won the Aurealis Award for Excellence for the Deltora Quest series and, more recently, for World of Monsters.