Our Authors.
Edward Berridge
Edward Berridge’s first book, The Lives of The Saints, kickstarted the original wave of 1990s dirty realism. Brutal, unflinching and funny, reviewers were captivated by it and Who Magazine called it pornography. Dog eared and battered copies have been passed from hand to hand for over twenty years. Edward’s next novel is a darkly comic domestic noir confronting divorce and aging. Imagine Big Little Lies written by Michel Houllebecq. As an author, Edward is concerned with sex, how women and men relate to each other and mortality.
Jeremy Aitken
Jeremy Aitken is a Vogel short listed author. His first novel, Crystal Street, sheds a grim documentarian’s light on men’s lives lived in desperation. His literary aesthetic is shaped by the spare and uncompromising language economy of Hemingway and McCarthy and the street-level cinematography of the French New Wave and Italian realist movies of the sixties. Aitken’s writing refuses to turn a blind eye to the darkness of the human experience and seeks to express the briefest moments of illumination that arise from the shadows.
Chris Fleming
Chris Fleming has spent the last twenty years teaching writing and philosophy in Australia and the United States. He has written some critically acclaimed books, including a study of the work of French philosopher René Girard, whose letters he has also translated for Bloomsbury, and Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid, which one American reviewer declared as being “probably the only book you need to read on the topic.” There is a quality of anarchic, darkly comic play in his fiction, which reminds one of writers like Kafka, Donald Antrim, and the miscellaneous members of the Oulipo.
Nick Gordon
Nick Gordon got a medal and a PHD, lectured and tutored for about 10 years, and then went off travelling. We don't know where he is or when he is coming back.
Mary Shuttleworth
Mary Shuttleworth is a Canberra based writer with roots in Melbourne. She is interested in mental health, love, and human connection, and explores their interaction in her work. She has performed her poetry on stages in Berlin and London, and has had her short stories commended in national and international competitions. Best Independent is proud to publish Mary's new book Two and Five and her work will be featured in our upcoming anthology.
Andrew Morgan
Andrew Morgan grew up in Newcastle, NSW. His writing has been published in Overland and Going Down Swinging. Andrew was a recipient of an Australia Council Varuna Writers' Centre Mentorship and won the Melbourne Lord Mayor's Creative Writing Award for his novella Good on Paper (Hunter, 2013). He lives in Melbourne. Best Independent is pleased to include Morgan's work in our upcoming anthology.