Helen Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong, and was educated there and at Melbourne University. She taught in Victorian secondary schools until 1972, when she was dismissed for answering her students’ questions about sex, and had to start writing journalism for a living.

Her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977, won the 1978 National Book Council Award, and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then she has published novels, short stories, essays, and feature journalism. Her screenplay The Last Days of Chez Nous was filmed in 1990. Garner has won many prizes, among them a Walkley Award for her 1993 article about the murder of two-year-old Daniel Valerio. In 1995 she published The First Stone, a controversial account of a Melbourne University sexual harassment case. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) was a non-fiction study of two murder trials in Canberra.

In 2006 Helen Garner received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel, The Spare Room (2008), won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction and the Barbara Jefferis Award, and has been translated into many languages.

Helen Garner lives in Melbourne.

Ramona Koval is a writer, journalist, broadcaster, and editor.

Born in Melbourne to immigrant parents she studied microbiology and genetics before turning to science journalism, then to current affairs and literary journalism before finally working full-time as a writer. In her spare(!) time she loves learning new languages and cooking for her six grandchildren.

Her latest book is A Letter to Layla: Travels to our Deep Past and Near Future (Text)

Her personal website is ramonakoval.com where you will find selected interviews with Ramona, transcripts and recordings of a range of her literary interviews with the world's best writers and reviews of her books.

As a broadcaster, she presented major literary programs on ABC Radio National which were broadcast nationally on Radio National, internationally through Radio Australia, and podcast on the internet.

She has written reviews, features and columns for newspapers and written on issues of the day. She has made documentary features for radio, which have been broadcast both by the ABC and the BBC.

Transcripts of her interviews have appeared in international newspapers, magazines and in digital form, and she has been a guest interviewer at International literary festivals in Edinburgh, Montreal, Berlin, Cheltenham, Auckland, Wellington and all over Australia.

She is also the author of a novel, Samovar (Heinemann), of collections of interviews, most recently Speaking Volumes - conversations with remarkable writers (Scribe, also translated into Chinese and Portuguese), of a Jewish cook book, Jewish Cooking, Jewish Cooks (New Holland) and she edited The Best Australian Essays 2011 and The Best Australian Essays 2012 (Black Inc)

On By the Book: A Reader's Guide to Life, Text Publishing

'She's a shining presence in the world of literature, here in Australia and right across the globe.'

'The book reads smoothly, it flows along from mood to mood, full of wit and beauty and grace.'

'Her voice is always recognisable, invigorating, familiar to us and greatly loved: the voice of [a] highly literate woman.'

Helen Garner

" ...By the Book: A Reader's Guide to Life [is] an irresistible study of the symbiotic relationship,for the bookish, between life and books. The subject matter ranges from the simplicities of childhood reading to the complexities of interviewing great writers. The voice is easily recognisable as the one we know from her decades in radio: generous, warm, and fearless."

Kerryn Goldsworthy, Books of the Year, Australian Book Review, December 2012 - January 2013, No.347

"The excitement with which Koval still approaches each new book, plunging in “head first, heart deep”, furnishes the last words of this urbane and enlightening work of her own."

Peter Pierce editor of the Cambridge History of Australian Literature, reviewing By the Book: A Reader's Guide to Life, for The Australian, 27 October 2012