A MEGA Drop of New Podcasts

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, bestselling author, filmmaker and co-founder of Declassified Australia. He’s written for The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many others. His books include Pills, Powder and Smoke, Disaster Capitalism, and My Israel Question. His documentary films include Disaster Capitalism and the Al Jazeera English films West Africa’s Opioid Crisis and Under the Cover of Covid. He was based in East Jerusalem 2016–2020.

Iconic Australian actor Bryan Brown became an international success in the early eighties with critical acclaim from performances in Breaker Morant and the TV series A Town Like Alice. A stream of Australian hits and Hollywood productions followed including The Thorn Birds, Gorillas in the Mist, FX, Newsfront, The Shiralee, Cocktail, Two Hands, Beautiful Kate, Along Came Polly, Australia and in 2019 Palm Beach which he produced and starred in. In a 40-year career Bryan has appeared in over 80 films and worked in some 25 countries. This achievement earned him the prestigious Longford Lyell Award at the 2018 AACTAs recognising his contribution to Australian cinema.

Chris Hammer was a journalist for more than thirty years, dividing his career between covering Australian federal politics and international affairs. For many years he was a roving foreign correspondent for SBS TV's flagship current affairs program Dateline. He has reported from more than thirty countries on six continents. In Canberra, roles included chief political correspondent for The Bulletin, current affairs correspondent for SBS TV and a senior political journalist for The Age. His first book, The River, published in 2010 to critical acclaim, was the recipient of the ACT Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Walkley Book Award and the Manning Clark House National Cultural Award. Scrublands, his first novel, was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for Best Debut Fiction at the Indie Book Awards, shortlisted for Best General Fiction at the Australian Book Industry Awards, shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards and won the UK Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Debut Dagger Award. His second novel, Silver, was published in 2019 and was shortlisted for Best General Fiction at the Australian Book Industry Awards, shortlisted for the 2020 ABA Booksellers' Choice Book of the Year Award, and longlisted for the UK Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Chris has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Charles Sturt University and a master's degree in international relations from the Australian National University. He lives in Canberra with his wife, Dr Tomoko Akami. The couple have two children.

Trent Dalton is the author of Boy Swallows Universe (HarperCollins, 2018), a critically acclaimed national bestseller and winner of the 2019 Indie Book of the Year Award, the MUD Literary Prize, and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the People's Choice Award at the 2019 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. At the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards, the book won a record four awards, including the prestigious Book of the Year Award. Boy Swallows Universe has been published across thirty-four English language and translation territories. His second novel, All Our Shimmering Skies, was published by HarperCollins in October 2020 and has also become a national bestseller. He's also a two-time winner of a Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism, a four-time winner of a Kennedy Award for Excellence in NSW Journalism and a four-time winner of the national News Awards Features Journalist of the Year.

Photo credit: David Kelly

Kaz Cooke is an Australian author, cartoonist and radio broadcaster.Her background is in news and feature journalism in Melbourne, Sydney and Darwin. Her career began a month after she left school, in 1981, at The Age newspaper and since then she’s written for heaps of other major daily newspapers (The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and the Canberra Times) and magazines (including Who Weekly and the Women’s Weekly).Since becoming a Mum in 1998 she has mainly worked from home writing books in her pyjamas; and still doesn’t know why there were books in her pyjamas (boom, boom). There have been some scuttling forays into radio shows with varying degrees of success (from “this is fun!” to “I’d rather eat my own shins with a fork”). Kaz illustrates her own work with cartoons, since 1983 often featuring Hermoine the Modern Girl.

Robyn Davidson was born on a cattle property in Queensland. She went to Sydney in the late sixties, then returned to study in Brisbane before going to Alice Springs where the events of her book, Tracks, began. Since then she has travelled extensively, has lived in London, New York and India. In the early 1990's she migrated with and wrote about nomads in north west India. She is now based in Melbourne, but spends several months a year in the Indian Himalayas.