Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature

Jane McCredie is an award-winning journalist, writer and reviewer who has been widely published in Australia and internationally. A former book publisher, she is the CEO of Writing NSW and the founder and director of the Quantum Words Festival of writing about science. She is the author of Making Girls and Boys: Inside the science of sex and was coeditor of the 2013 anthology of The Best Australian Science Writing.

Jane is a graduate of the Australia Council’s arts leaders program and has previously chaired both the Christina Stead and Douglas Stewart panels of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Felicity Castagna’s most recent novel, No More Boats, was a finalist in the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Awards and is published internationally. She is also the author of Small Indiscretions and The Incredible Here and Now, which received The Prime Minister’s Award for Young Adult Literature, as well as the International Board On Books For Young People’s award for writing. Her next book Girls in Boys’ Cars will be released in 2021.

She publishes essays on home, suburbia, art-making and literature in many different places and reviews books for ABC radio and television. She is very interested in cross-artform collaboration and has worked with artists in many different fields to produce work for The Sydney Festival, The National Theatre of Parramatta, The Four Winds Festival and lots of other places. She also makes all sorts of collaborative, complex and dynamic stories with The Finishing School Collective. She holds a PhD from The Writing and Society Research Centre, WSU and teaches creative writing at universities, schools and many other places all over Australia.

Sarah Ayoub is a journalist and author whose work has been published in the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Girlfriend, ELLE, Marie-Claire, SBS, ABC The Drum, Cosmopolitan and more. She teaches journalism and writing at the University of Notre Dame, where she is a PhD candidate researching the representations of culturally diverse females in Australian YA literature.

She is a regular fixture at schools and writer's festivals around the country, has been invited to speak at Children's Literature events both locally and abroad, has worked with Sweatshop and the Stella Prize, and is a mentor to the youth curators of The Sydney Writer's Festival YA program.  Her second novel, The Yearbook Committee, was longlisted for The Gold Inky, Australia's premier teen choice award. 

Erin Gough is the author of two novels for young adults; The Flywheel, which won the Ampersand Prize; and Amelia Westlake, winner of the Readings Young Adult Book Prize and the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature. Her books have been published in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Canada and the United States.