PANELISTS
Rachel Bin Salleh
Rachel Bin Salleh is the Publisher of the award-winning Magabala Books publishing house. She descends from the Nimunburr and Yawuru peoples of the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
Rachel is passionate about Indigenous people telling their stories and started her career in publishing at Magabala Books in the 1990s.
FREDA CHIU
Freda Chiu is an illustrator and author from Sydney, Australia. As well as illustrating children's books, her work spans comics, editorial, public art and retail graphics. Her selected clients include Allen and Unwin, Hardie Grant, Walker Books and Penguin Random House among others. Outside her art practice, Freda lectures in Illustration and Animation Design at the University of Technology Sydney. Her debut picture book, A Trip to the Hospital, was short-listed for the IBBY Australia Ena Noël Award and for the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA)’s New Illustrator Award.
ReBecca Lim
Rebecca Lim is an Australian writer, illustrator, editor and lawyer. She is the author of over twenty books, including The Astrologer’s Daughter (a Kirkus Best Book of 2015 and CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers) and the internationally bestselling Mercy. Her work has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, shortlisted multiple times for the Aurealis Awards and Davitt Awards and longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award. Rebecca is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative to support emerging young adult and children’s authors and illustrators who are First Nations, People of Colour, LGBTIQA+ or living with disability, and is a co-editor of Meet Me at the Intersection, a groundbreaking anthology of YA #OwnVoice memoir, poetry and fiction.
Miriam Rosenbloom
Miriam Rosenbloom is the founder and publishing director of Scribble, Scribe’s first children’s imprint. Since its launch in 2016, Scribble has gone on to win many local and international awards, including the 2019 BOP-Bologna Prize Best Children's Publishers of the Year for Oceania. Scribble focuses on books that both kids and adults will delight in, and that reflect the many varied experiences of our shared lives and communities.
Miriam’s background is in book design, and design and illustration are at the heart of Scribble’s books. Scribble’s mission is to push boundaries and contribute to wider design conversations beyond the world of publishing, while remaining accessible to the mainstream market. Miriam has commissioned a list of widely loved books, including Daniel Gray-Barnett’s CBCA-winning Grandma Z, Felicita Sala’s award-winning and internationally bestselling Lunch at 10 Pomegranate Street, and Davina Bell and Allison Colpoys’ wildly successful All the Ways to be Smart, as well as other beloved books in this exceptional creative duo’s emotional intelligence-focused picture-book series.
Jane Stratton
Jane Stratton is the CEO and founder of the Think+DO Tank Foundation.
In 2017, Jane created the highly successful social enterprise LOST IN BOOKS, a multilingual kids’ bookshop, creative community hub and safer space for women and children in Fairfield, South Western Sydney.
Jane works to elevate the voices of low socio-economic and excluded community members to inform and to model systems change. She enables multi-disciplinary collaborative projects, enterprises and enquiries in response to the question: “What would make life here easier, better or more affordable?”.
Jane’s intelligent and empathetic approach has fostered her reputation as a courageous leader at the forefront of collaborative work with communities,inspiring those within them and beyond them to broaden the horizon of what is possible.