Behrouz Boochani is an award-winning Kurdish writer, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. His memoir No Friend But the Mountains (Pan Macmillan 2018, trans. Omid Tofighian) was written during his seven years of incarceration by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island prison. His newest book, a collection of short fiction stories, is scheduled to be published in 2026. Overall, his work represents an attempt to produce knowledge and ideas within the context of colonialism — both in Kurdistan and in relation to the history and mentality of colonialism in Australia.   

Hoda Afshar is a visual artist whose practice focuses on the intricate relationships between politics and aesthetics, knowledge and representation, visibility and violence. She is interested in the ways that image-making can either reinforce or challenge our common sense, and the forces that shape perception. Her works invite audiences to reflect on and to rethink how and what we see, often by drawing attention to parts of the political and visible order that have previously been excluded. 

Vernon Ah Kee’s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of “primitives”, and effectively reposition Aboriginal culture and people in Australia from an “othered thing”, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time