Teaching staff
Our incredible teaching and research staff within the creative writing and publishing sector are experts in their professions and well-connected to industry.
“Fiction in all its glory! I write commercial fiction under the name Tess LeSue with Penguin Random House USA. Publisher’s Weekly calls my work ‘witty and memorable’; RT Book Reviews praised it for being ‘a delightful rollercoaster ride’; Guilty Pleasures Book Reviews gave my latest book five stars and All About Romance summed it up as ‘funny, romantic and appealingly entertaining, [while] unflinchingly portraying the ugly underbelly of the old west’.”
An award-winning novelist, Dr Amy Matthews is the Chair of Writers SA and a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University. Amy’s academic and teaching skills have also been recognised in multiple honours and awards.
As Tess LeSue, Amy’s romance fiction novels have seen her stamp her mark on an industry worth over $1 billion and accounting for over 50% of all paperbacks sold.
Amy is a highly skilled, engaging lecturer in touch with both the scholarly and commercial aspects of Creative Writing.
Dr Sean Williams is one of Australia’s most-awarded speculative fiction writers. With over forty novels and one hundred and twenty short stories for adults, young adults and children, the #1 New York Times-bestselling author certainly ‘walks the walk’ as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders.
“My work has been nominated thirty times for the Aurealis Award, in the categories of Science Fiction Novel and Short Story, YA Novel, Children’s Novel, Fantasy Novel, Horror Short Story, and Collection. Also, for the Ditmar Award my work has been nominated seventeen times in the categories of Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Collection, and Professional Achievement. In 1999, I received the “SA Great” Award for Literature.”
Sean’s literary achievements are incredible, ranging from speculative fiction to realism, resulting in him being named the “King of Chameleons” by Australian Book Review for the diversity of his published output.
"As author Lisa L. Hannett, most of Dr Lisa Bennett's works are categorised as 'Dark Fantasy' or 'Horror', which is hilarious considering all versions of Lisa are afraid of the dark."
Lisa Bennett teaches undergraduate and Honours classes in Creative Writing and English, and she is a specialist in Old-Norse Icelandic literature, the Viking Age, genre fiction, and creative practice. She is the author of Writing Bestsellers: Love, Money and Creative Practice (with Kim Wilkins; Cambridge University Press, 2021). Lisa regularly writes reviews for the ABR and is a frequent guest on ABC Radio's 'Book of the Week' segment.
Under her pen name, Lisa L. Hannett, she is an internationally recognised, multiple award-winning writer of five short story collections, a novel, and over 80 speculative fiction short stories (fantasy, science fiction, horror, and historical fiction). Lisa's recent book, Viking Women: Life and Lore (Thames & Hudson, 2023) combines her research expertise and her skills as a storyteller, presenting speculative biographies of Viking women from all ages and social strata (slaves, housewives, mothers, far-travellers, young girls, old widows, and anchoresses) alongside engaging historical context.
Alex Cothren’s multi-award-winning short stories address social issues through the lens of satire, parody and comedy-horror. Featuring haunted pokies machines, political bee cults and chainsaw-wielding bears, his weird works have graced (or marred) the pages of our country’s best publications, such as The Griffith Review, Meanjin, Overland, and Island. In 2023, he was named a Griffith Review Emerging Voice.
“Each time I hit ‘send’ on a story, I assume this one will be too dark, too strange, too close to the bone. But the editors keep publishing them! I guess our literary gatekeepers are as sick as I am…”
His stories may be tongue-in-cheek, but Alex takes the transformative power of the arts very seriously. His current research focuses include how the arts can help our health and wellbeing, and how storytelling can offer a new path forward in our climate crisis. An award-winning teacher, Alex introduces play and creativity into every class, propelled by a belief that students’ stories can truly change the world.
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