Sydney Writers' Festival

SHAUN DAVIES (LOCAL)
Shaun Davies is a co-founder of non-generic productions.

GEORGE GITTOES (LOCAL)
George Gittoes is an Australian artist who travels the globe to find his subjects. He is well known for his forays to the world’s trouble spots – including Tibet, Rwanda, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iraq. He has also worked and exhibited in Australia, Taiwan, China, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Yemen and the US.

PETER STANLEY (LOCAL)
Peter Stanley is Director of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia and former Principal Historian of the Australian War Memorial. He has published 19 books, mainly on war experience and memory in the 20th century. His next books will be Invading Australia and Twelve Men on Mont St Quentin.

MATTHEW THOMPSON (LOCAL)
Matthew Thompson has written extensively about Muslim insurgencies in the southern Philippines, sharing Pepsi with Abu Sayyaf bomb-makers and beer with Filipino Marines. His literary reportage from Colombia, My Colombian Death, will be published later this year.

PAUL MCGEOUGH (LOCAL)
Paul McGeough is chief correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and spends much of his time in conflict zones – Iraq and Afghanistan in particular. In close to 20 years as a foreign correspondent, McGeough has travelled to almost 70 countries, reporting on crisis and conflict in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Lebanon, the Balkans, East Timor, Indonesia, Pakistan and Northern Ireland.

He is a former editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and the author of several books, including Manhattan to Baghdad: Despatches from the Frontline in the War on Terror and In Baghdad: A Reporter’s War. His next book, which is on the Middle East, is to be published early next year by Allen & Unwin in Australia and The New Press in the US. McGeough’s career as a journalist began as a cadet reporter on The West Australian in 1975.