ARA Historical Novel Prize

Judges and Mentors

Meet the Judges

2025 Judging Panel

Adult Category

  • Angelo Loukakis has been a writer, teacher, scriptwriter, editor and publisher. He is the author of the fiction titles For the Patriarch, Vernacular Dreams, Messenger, The Memory of Tides, and Houdini’s Flight. His non-fiction works include a book for children, The Greeks, and the book of the SBS television series, Who Do You Think You Are? His collection of short stories, For the Patriarch, was winner of a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. He was the founding chair of the NSW Writers’ Centre (now Writing NSW), and Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors (2010–16).

  • Jane Harrison is descended from the Muruwari people of NSW. Her plays include Stolen Rainbow’s End and The Visitors. The opera The Visitors premiered in 2023. Her books include Becoming Kirrali Lewis and The Visitors which won the Indie Debut Book of the Year 2024. She was the Festival Director of Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival (2016 - 2024). The Visitors was also longlisted in the 2024 ARA Historical Novel Prize.

  • Rashida Murphy lives on the unceded lands of the Noongar people of Western Australia. She is the author of The Historian's Daughter and The Bonesetter's Fee. Both books were shortlisted in multiple international and national awards. She is the founder of The Writers' Collective and has previously been a judge of the WA Premier's Literary Awards and the Hungerford Awards as well as the Twenty/Forty Prize. Her new writing is forthcoming in The Westerly, The Rituals Anthology, and Words' Waltz. 

  • Stephanie Parkyn is the author of three novels of historical fiction published by Allen & Unwin: Into the World, Josephine’s Garden and The Freedom of Birds.  Her debut novel was longlisted for the Tasmanian Premiere’s Literary Awards. All her work aims to bring historical women's lives into the spotlight and explores imbalance of power in turbulent periods of history. Stephanie holds a PhD in environmental science and was formerly an ecologist, but she now writes fiction among the bush and beaches of the Coromandel peninsula in Aotearoa and co-hosts a writing retreat, the Northern Coromandel Writers Escape.

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  • For over 20 years, Scott Whitmont proudly owned and operated the independent Lindfield Bookshop and Children's Bookshop, hosting many literary and author conversation programs until its closure at the end of 2019. He then served as Booktopia’s Manager of Special Sales for five years before accepting a job outside the industry as Community Engagement Manager for Qtopia Sydney, the world’s biggest museum and centre for Queer history and culture.

    A long-term member of the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival Organising Committee, he is also a Past President of the Australian Booksellers Association (NSW) and served on its National Board. 

    Passionate about books, history and genealogy, though no longer working full-time in the book industry, Scott still regularly moderates author events for festivals, libraries and restaurant literary dinner programs. He also keeps busy in his ‘spare time’, hosting trivia evenings, working as a city tour guide and lecturing to groups on various history topics.

Children and Young Adult (CYA) Category

  • Dr Mark Macleod designed courses in Children's Literature for Macquarie University and Charles Sturt University and has taught at universities and writers' centres around the world. For many years he was a regular presenter on national television and radio, and mentors many developing writers and illustrators.

    As Publishing Director at Random House Australia and Publisher at Hachette Australia, with his own name list Mark Macleod Books, he has won many awards, been National President of the Children's Book Council of Australia, President of the NSW Branch and a judge for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, among other prizes.

  • Rebecca Lim is an Australian writer, illustrator, editor and lawyer, and the author of over twenty books, including Tiger Daughter (a Kirkus, Amazon and Booklist Best Book, CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award-winner), Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky (NSW Premier's History Award-winner and Book Links Children’s Historical Fiction Award-winner) and the bestselling Mercy. Her work has been twice shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards, ARA Historical Novel Prize and Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, shortlisted multiple times for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Aurealis Awards and Davitt Awards, and longlisted for the Gold Inky Award, the David Gemmell Legend Award and Tasmanian Literary Awards. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Turkish, Portuguese, Polish, Vietnamese and Russian. She is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative and co-editor of Meet Me at the Intersection, a groundbreaking anthology of YA #OwnVoice memoir, poetry and fiction.

  • Belinda Murrell worked as a travel writer and journalist before becoming the award-winning, internationally published author of more than 35 books, ranging from junior fiction to historical novels for children and adult non-fiction. Belinda’s books include popular series The Daredevil Princess, Lulu Bell and Pippa’s Island, historical novels The Ivory Rose, The Locket of Dreams,The Forgotten Pearl and The Lost Sapphire and an adult non-fiction biography, Searching for Charlotte. Accolades include Honour Book KOALAS, shortlisted eleven times for Young Australian Best Book Awards, CBCA Notables, highly commended PM’s Literary Awards and Society of Women Writers Di Yerbury award.

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2024 Judging Panel

Adult Category

  • Dr Tony Maniaty is a Sydney-based writer, photographer and academic. His career spans a wide range of roles – fiction and non-fiction author, foreign correspondent, photojournalist, screenwriter and book reviewer. He was the Paris-based European Correspondent for SBS Television, Executive Producer of ABC’s ‘7.30 Report’ and Associate Professor of Creative Practice at UTS. His novels include Smryna, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Tony holds a Doctorate in Media Studies.

    For more information, visit:

  • Meenakshi Bharat, writer, translator, reviewer and cultural theorist, teaches in the University of Delhi.

    Her special interests include children’s literature, women’s fiction, and film, postcolonial, translation and cultural studies—areas which she has extensively researched. She is a published translator and author of academic works and short fiction for both children and adults.  She has co-edited and contributed to five successful Indo-Australian Short Fiction anthologies on terrorism, asylum seekers and refugees, and written two monographs exploring terrorism in contemporary Indian culture.

    She served as President of the International Federation of Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM, UNESCO, 2014-2017), as a bureau member of the International Council of Philosophy and the Human Sciences (CIPSH, UNESCO) and as the Treasurer of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA) from 2012-2016. 

    For further information, please visit her Website.

  • Jamaican-born Sienna Brown writes historical fiction that centres on the Caribbean Experience in Jamaica and Australia. Her novel Master of My Fate (2019), won the MUD Literary Prize at Adelaide Writers Week for the best debut novel and was shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize. In 2021, she was commissioned by ABC Radio National to create Caribbean Convicts in Australia. Since 2022, she’s been a Research Associate at Western Sydney University as part of the ARC project ‘Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia.’ She’s just completed her second historical fiction novel – Love Under A Tropical Sun. For further information, visit:

  • Catherine Chidgey is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Waikato and lives in Ngāruawāhia. Her novels have been published to international acclaim. In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific), and in the UK it won the Betty Trask Award. Other honours include the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for her historical novel The Wish Child; she also won this prize for The Axeman’s Carnival. Her historical novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK.

    In 2019, with sponsorship from the University, she conceived the Sargeson Prize – New Zealand’s richest short story competition, which she still administers. For further information, visit:

  • Michael Williams is the editor of The Monthly and host of weekly books podcast Read This. He was previously the Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival, and CEO of the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne for a decade. 

Children and Young Adult (CYA) Category

  • Anna Ciddor is an award-winning and best-selling author of nearly sixty historical books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her fascination with the past goes back as far as she can remember. As a child in the 1960s, she pleaded with her parents to buy her an antique doll. The quest for this treasure became the theme for her semi-autobiographical novel 52 Mondays (2019), longlisted for the inaugural Book Links Award for Children’s Historical Fiction. The Boy Who Stepped Through Time (2021), a time-slip adventure about a boy who travels back to Roman times, was longlisted for the 2021 ARA CYA Historical Novel Prize and short listed for the Aurealis Award for Best Children’s Fiction. 

    Anna has won many other accolades including the Nance Donkin Award for Children’s Literature, three Notable Book awards from the Children’s Book Council of Australia, several shortlistings for Children’s Choice Book Awards, and a grant from the Australia Council. Her books have been translated and sold around the world. 

    Anna’s forthcoming novel Moonboy is another time travel adventure, this time carrying the modern character back to Anna’s own remembered past again, the exciting time of the first moon landing in1969.

    For further information, visit her Website.

  • Dr Danielle Clode is a narrative nonfiction writer of Australian environment, history and biographies, with a particular interest in French voyages of exploration to Australia. Her books have won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction, Whitley Awards for popular ecology and been shortlisted for the National Biography Awards, Children’s Book Council Awards and Adelaide Festival Awards.  She is a serving board director for the Australian Society of Authors and Authors Legal. She has taught creative and academic writing at Melbourne and Flinders University and has a broad and eclectic range of academic publications and essays. For further information, please visit:

  • Lystra Rose is a multi-award-winning novelist of Guugu Yimithirr, Birri Gubba, Erub/Mua, and Scottish heritage who lives on Yugambeh-speaking Country (Gold Coast). When she’s not catching waves with her husband and two groms, Lystra is editor-in-chief of Surfing Life magazine—the first female editor of a mainstream surf mag in the world. Lystra loves surfing; it hydropowers her creativity. The idea for The Upwelling came while surfing at Kirra Point.

    The Upwelling is Lystra’s debut novel, which collected several awards in 2023 including winning the NSW Premier’s Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Indigenous Writing. The book was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for Young Adult Literature, the NSW Premier’s UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, and the Reading’s Young Adult Prize. The Upwelling was also longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize in the Children and Young Adult category, and won the State Library of QLD’s 2018 black&write fellowship for an unpublished manuscript.

    Lystra is penning The Upwarping and The Upworlding, implementing a ‘cultural education by stealth’ methodology. For further information, please visit:

2023 Judging Panel

Adult Category

  • Dr Robert Gott is the author of more than 100 mostly non-fiction books for children, and nine historical crime novels for adults set in Australia in the 1940s. He is also the creator of the long-running cartoon in The Age newspaper, The Adventures of Naked Man. His most recent novel, to be published in May 2023 is Naked Ambition, a comedy about the Archibald Prize.

  • Renée Otmar has been a professional editor since 1989 and has worked extensively as an editor, public health researcher and ethicist. She is a consultant and practising editor in academic, creative nonfiction and fiction genres – in contemporary fiction, historical fiction, crime fiction and romance. Renée provides teaching and training for editors and writers, and regularly presents guest lectures, workshops and seminars on editing for diversity and representation. A certified coach, she offers training and professional supervision for editors and writers working with sensitive, explicit or distressing content. Renée has served as a board director and on human research ethics committees since 2013.

    In 2000 Renée was awarded Honorary Life Membership of Editors Victoria, a branch of the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), and in 2008 became a Distinguished Editor of IPEd. In 2022 she was honoured with the Janet Mackenzie Medal for outstanding service to the editing profession. Her recent work is Editing for Sensitivity, Diversity and Inclusion: A guide for professional editors (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition forthcoming July/August 2023). For more information:

  • Lucy Treloar is the award-winning author of the novels Salt Creek (2015) and Wolfe Island (2019). Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Best Australian Stories, among others. A graduate of the University of Melbourne and RMIT, Lucy lives in Melbourne. She is currently undertaking a PhD at La Trobe University. Her third novel, Days of Innocence and Wonder is forthcoming. For more information:

Children and Young Adult (CYA) Category

  • Christopher Cheng is the author of the critically acclaimed and multi published picture book ‘Bear and Rat’ (published in the USA as ‘Will We Always Hold Hands?’), a loving tribute to his wife that Kirkus Reviews says is simultaneously quietly soothing yet deeply empowering—a friendship tale for the ages.

    Other picture books include One Tree, New Year Surprise!, Old Fellow, Wombat and the award winning titles One child, and Sounds Spooky. Soon to be released titles include Powerful like a Dragon, Quolls and Dragon Folding.

    He has written historical fiction and non-fiction and he compiled the ever popular Classic Australian Poems. In addition to his books, Christopher writes articles for magazines, ezines and blogs and he wrote the libretto for a children’ s musical.

    He is co-chair of the International Advisory Council for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), an ambassador for Australia’s National Centre of Children’s Literature (NCACL), holds a Master of Arts in Children’s Literature and is a recipient of the Lady Cutler Award for Children’s Literature. An experienced presenter in all media forms he speaks to students, teachers and parents in schools, conferences and festivals worldwide. He also established the international peer voted SCBWI Crystal Kite Awards.

    An infants/primary teacher by profession, Christopher was also Zoo Education officer at Taronga Zoo Sydney for 8 years developing Australia’s first Zoomobile. He dwells in an inner-city Sydney terrace and is often heard to say that he has the best job in the world! For more information:

  • Dr Craig Cormick OAM is an awarding-winning science communicator and author, who has published over 40 books of fiction and non-fiction for adults and young people. He enjoys playing with history just about as much as history enjoys playing with him. When not researching and writing he spends his time working in, and visiting, Antarctica. Find him at: www.craigcormick.com

  • Lauren Keenan (Te Ātiawa ki Taranaki) is a writer of both fiction and popular psychology. Her writing was kick-started by participating in the 2016 Te Papa Tupu Māori Writers’ programme. In 2017, she won the Pikihuia Short Story award for Māori writers. Lauren has since had two full-length books published: The 52 Week Project: How I Fixed My Life by Trying a New Thing Every Week for a Year  (Allen and Unwin NZ, 2020) and Amorangi and Millie’s Trip Through Time (Huia, 2022). Amorangi and Millie’s Trip Through Time was a finalist in the Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Junior Fiction Award in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and longlisted for the 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize. She has recently finished the next book in her New Zealand time travel series for children which will be released next year. For further information, visit:

2022 Judging Panel

Adult Category

  • Angelo Loukakis has been a writer, teacher, scriptwriter, editor and publisher. He is the author of the fiction titles For the Patriarch, Vernacular Dreams, Messenger, The Memory of Tides, and Houdini’s Flight. His non-fiction works include a book for children, The Greeks, and the book of the SBS television series, Who Do You Think You Are? His collection of short stories, For the Patriarch, was winner of a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. He was the founding chair of the NSW Writers’ Centre (now Writing NSW), and Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors (2010–16).

  • Meg Keneally is the author of The Wreck and Fled. With Tom Keneally, she is co-author of the four-book Monsarrat Series of historical murder mysteries. With Leah Kaminsky she co-edited Animals Make Us Human. Her next historical novel, The Last Queen, will be out in 2022. For further information:

    Due to actual or perceived conflicts of interest in relation to authors entered in the Prize, Meg Keneally withdrew from critical decision making in determining the longlist, and withdrew from judging the shortlist and winner. This is in accordance with the HNSA’s Conflicts of Interest policy.

  • Identifying proudly as an East coast salt-water First Nation person of Australia, Madison is a multi-disciplinary lawyer, filmmaker, artist and scholar who has developed extensive academic and pedagogical experience writing and coordinating all units of the Indigenous Major at Western Sydney University. Whilst still leading the Indigenous Major she is also engaged in decolonising cultural interface research at Flinders University and is privileged to learn from and collaborate with First Nations Peoples of Australia and globally.

Children and Young Adult (CYA) Category

  • Paul Macdonald owns the award-winning The Children’s Bookshop which has been a Sydney literary institution since 1971. Paul has a Master of Education, working almost 20 years as a teacher of Upper Primary and Secondary.

    He has won numerous awards in teaching such as a Quality Teacher Award and The Premiers English Scholarship. Paul won the inaugural Maurice Saxby Award in 2012 for his contributions to raising the profile of teen fiction. Paul Macdonald also was the winner of the 2016 Lady Cutler award for services to children’s literature and literacy in Australia.

    Paul not only manages The Children’s Bookshop Speakers’ Agency but is also a consultant working with numerous schools focusing on building reading cultures and he is currently completing his PhD focusing on Australian Young Adult literature. Paul is the author of the picture book The Hole Idea and has written several other academic texts. For further information, please visit:

  • Rachael King is an award-winning author with three novels under her belt: The Sound of Butterflies, set in the Brazilian rubber boom of the early 20th century, which was published internationally and translated into nine languages; Magpie Hall, a gothic novel set in Canterbury; and Red Rocks, a junior novel that won the Esther Glen medal in 2014. Rachael was the programme director of WORD Christchurch for eight years until the end of 2021, and this year is working on two linked books: a novel for children and a work of non-fiction. For further information, please visit: 

  • Deborah trained as a History/English teacher before becoming writer/producer of a national children’s TV show at Network TEN. She has since written 28 internationally published and awarded books, including her climate change trilogy, Grimsdon, New City and Final Storm and Teresa A New Australian, inspired by her family’s migration to Australia after the devastation of WW2. Her latest MG novel is The Book of Wondrous Possibilities, a magical story about the power of books to save us when we feel lost. For further information, please visit:

2021 Judging Panel

Adult Category

  • Nicole Alexander’s novels, poetry, travel, creative writing and genealogy articles have been published in Australia, America, Singapore, New Zealand, Germany and Canada. She is the author of ten bestselling historical novels, set predominantly in Australia. Nicole’s debut novel, The Bark Cutters was shortlisted for an Australian Book Industry Award and she holds a Master of Letters in creativewriting and literature. For more information, visit:

  • Carmel Bird is the author of more than thirty books – fiction, non-fiction, anthologies. Three of her novels have been short-listed for the Miles Franklin award, and she was the 2016 winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.

    She is a popular teacher of creative writing, as well as a highly respected book-reviewer. For further information, please visit:

  • Roanna Gonsalves is the award-winning author of The Permanent Resident published in India as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney. Her writing has been compared to the work of Alice Munro and Jhumpa Lahiri. Her four-part radio series On the tip of a billion tongues was commissioned and broadcast by ABC RN. Roanna is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award and The Bridge Awards’ inaugural Varuna – Cove Park Writing Residency in Scotland. She works as a lecturer in Creative Writing at UNSW, Sydney and serves on the Board of Writing NSW. For further information, visit:

Children and Young Adult (CYA) Category

  • Paul Macdonald owns the award-winning The Children’s Bookshop which has been a Sydney literary institution since 1971. Paul has a Master of Education, working almost 20 years as a teacher of Upper Primary and Secondary.

    He has won numerous awards in teaching such as a Quality Teacher Award and The Premiers English Scholarship. Paul won the inaugural Maurice Saxby Award in 2012 for his contributions to raising the profile of teen fiction. Paul Macdonald also was the winner of the 2016 Lady Cutler award for services to children’s literature and literacy in Australia.

    Paul not only manages The Children’s Bookshop Speakers’ Agency but is also a consultant working with numerous schools focusing on building reading cultures and he is currently completing his PhD focusing on Australian Young Adult literature. Paul is the author of the picture book The Hole Idea and has written several other academic texts. For further information, please visit:

  • Thuy On is a freelance arts journalist, critic and poet. She’s written for a range of publications including The Guardian, The Sydney Review of Books, The Australian, The Age/SMH, The Saturday Paper, ArtsHub and Books+Publishing. She is also the books editor of The Big Issue. Her collection of poetry, Turbulence, was published in 2020 by UWAP. For further information, please visit:

    Image courtesy of Brett Rawlings photography.

  • Catherine Mayo is an award-winning New Zealand YA, Adult and Children’s writer with strong research interests in Ancient Greece. She completed her BA as Senior Scholar in History, later returning to university to study The Odyssey in the original Greek.

    For many years, she has worked extensively as a professional musician, violin restorer and violin evaluator before embarking on her writing career. Five of her historical novels have been published internationally, and she has delivered several papers on the parallels between the Homeric world and Pasifika and Maori society and culture. For further information, please visit:

2020 Judging Panel

Adult Category

  • Linda Funnell is co-editor of the Newtown Review of Books, a free online book review founded with Jean Bedford in March 2012. For ten years she was a publisher with HarperCollins, and prior to that Random House. Currently she is a freelance editor and publishing consultant. The authors she has worked with include Colleen McCullough, Geraldine Brooks, Diane Armstrong, Louis Nowra and Steven Carroll. Linda has been a peer assessor for the Literature Board, a mentor for the Residential Editorial Program and has taught courses in publishing, editing and writing for UTS, the ASA and the Writing NSW.

    For more information:


  • Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Whatua) is the author of the story collection Forbidden Cities (2008); the long-form essay On Coming Home (2015); and eight novels, including Rangatira (2011), winner of best work of fiction at both the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards and Ngā Kupu Ora Maori Book Awards. Her most recent book is False River (2017), a collection of stories and essays around the subject of secret histories. She teaches creative writing at the University of Auckland, sits on the Māori Literature Trust, Mātātuhi Foundation, and New Zealand Book Awards Trust, and is the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature. Appointed an MZNM in the 2019 New Year Honours, she currently holds the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.

    Paula was our keynote speaker for the 2019 conference.

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  • Kirsty Murray is a multi-award-winning author of books for children and young adults. Her eleven novels are studied in schools and universities around the world. Kirsty has been a Creative Fellow of the State Library of Victoria and an Asialink Literature Resident in India. Her acclaimed series of historical fiction Children of the Wind follows the lives of four Irish-Australian children whose lives intersect across 150 years. In 2011, her YA novel India Dark won the NSW Premier’s History Award for Young People’s History.

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  • Colin Falconer is the author of over two dozen novels of historical fiction and has been translated into 23 languages. His novel Harem, based on the life of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, sold over a quarter a million copies Germany alone and Aztec, about the Spanish conquistadore, Hernan Cortes, was on the bestseller lists in Mexico for four months. His latest novel, Loving Liberty Levine, about Russian immigrants coming to New York just before World War 1, is published by Lake Union.

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    Image courtesy of Brett Rawlings photography.