CONFLUENCE

Toby Terlet has been working in the waste industry for over 20 years covering most facets of the waste, water, and in more recent times, Waste to Energy divisions. He first started his career in Adelaide managing Veolia’s Business Development/Sales divisions with the overall P/L responsibility of the regional areas from Mt Gambier through to Port Lincoln. In 2006, he moved to an ‘Australian first’ role as the Business Development Manager at Resourceco SA. He moved back to Veolia in 2010 as a Group Strategy & Development Manager where his key responsibilities were to develop state based strategic plans to identify growth areas and opportunities. Through this growth phase, he successfully implemented the $34 billion Ichthys waste management contract in Darwin and became the NT General Manager in 2013. Between 2015 and 2019, he was responsible for managing the largest single municipal treatment contract in Europe - Birmingham Tyseley UK Contract. His current role as the Project Director at Kwinana O&M is an exciting opportunity to use past international experience and learn from global experts to successfully deliver Australia's first Waste to Energy facility in Perth.

Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning Indian poet. Widely translated and anthologised, her book When God is a Traveller was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her new book of poems is Love Without a Story. As editor, her most recent book is the anthology Eating God. As prose writer, her books include The Book of Buddha, More Than a Life and most recently Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga. She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga award, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, among others.

Ben Stubbs is a senior lecturer in Journalism and Writing at the University of South Australia. Dr. Stubbs has worked as a travel writer previously for publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Toronto Star. He has published three books on travel writing, with his latest, The Crow Eaters: A Journey Through South Australia, exploring the untold stories and unexplored corners of South Australia.

Frank Dikötter is an historian best know for the People's Trilogy, a narrative history of China under Mao based on new archival material. His most recent book, How to be a Dictator, looks at the cult of personality in the 20th century through the careers of eight dictators.

John Zubrzycki’s latest book, Empire of Enchantment: The Story of Indian Magic, traces the evolution of the conjuring traditions of India from the realm of the gods to the domain of daily ritual and popular entertainment. A former deputy foreign editor at The Australian newspaper, he has worked in India as a foreign correspondent, diplomat and tour guide. His previous books are The Last Nizam: An Indian Prince in the Australian Outback, and The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy.

Kim Scott’s most recent novel is Taboo. Proud to call himself Noongar, Scott is also founder and chair of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Story Project. He is Professor of Writing in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University.

Mohammed Massoud Morsi is a writer and journalist. Morsi spent almost two decades as a freelance journalist and photographer immersed in communities with forgotten people and conflicts around the world. He primarily worked for NGOs and published feature articles in Danish newspapers. Morsi’s intimate images, whether from the edge of an AIDS hospital bed, from a rubbish dump with rubbish pickers in Cambodia, from the turmoil of the Gaza Strip or in South Lebanon, all reflect his deep sense of justice. His writing has appeared in Australian and international publications. He has authored three novels and five non-fiction books.

Melizarani T. Selva is a spoken word poet venturing into prose. Her notable performances include, TEDxGateway in Mumbai and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Her first book titled Taboo made the Top 10 Bestseller List on Malaysia’s number one online bookstore MPH. To date, her poems have been translated in French and Bahasa Malaysia. She co-runs the Malaysia National Poetry Slam and has published an anthology comprising of 100 poems by 61 poets from Malaysia titled When I Say Spoken, You Say Word!

Omar Sakr is an award-winning Arab-Australian poet, writer and editor. His debut collection, These Wild Houses was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. His new book is The Lost Arabs.

Paulo Lemos Horta is the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights, Aladdin: A New Translation, a Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year, and of Cosmopolitanisms. His writing has been translated into French, Portuguese and Turkish. He is a professor at NYU and resides in Barcelona. His writing has appeared been published in the Times Literary Supplement and the LA Review of Books.

Robin Jeffrey is a visiting research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore. His most recent book, co-authored with Assa Doron, is Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India. He and Doron also co-authored The Great Indian Phone Book. He taught school in Chandigarh from 1967-9 with the Canadian University Service Overseas, has lived about six years in India and worked for 25 years at La Trobe University in Melbourne and twice at the Australian National University.

Shashi Tharoor is an award-winning author of 18 books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Great Indian Novel, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, and the recently published The Paradoxical Prime Minister. He has won numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. A third-term Member of Parliament representing Thiruvananthapuram, Dr. Tharoor has served as Minister of State in the Government of India and also served as Under-Secretary General of the United Nations during Kofi Annan’s tenure as head.

Stephen Smith has been a Professor of Public International Law at the University of Western Australia since 2014. Smith was Federal Member for Perth for the Australian Labor Party from 1993 until 2013. In a distinguished career spanning 20 years in the Australian Federal Parliament, he has served as the Minister for Defence, and prior to that, as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Trade.

Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa is a first-generation Australian-Sikh spoken word poet, performer and playwright based in Perth. Khalsa is passionate about diversity and the importance of visibility in the performing arts and inherently merges her advocacy background with the arts. Her work predominantly provokes conversations around Australian identity, feminism and the power of uncomfortable conversations. Her debut theatre show with Barking Gecko Theatre Company & Black Swan Theatre Company is titled Fully Sikh and premiered in 2019.

Toby Walsh is Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the UNSW Sydney, Data61 and Technical University of Berlin. He was named by the Australian newspaper as one of the 'rock stars' of Australia's digital revolution. Professor Walsh is a strong advocate for limits to ensure AI is used to improve our lives. He has been a leading voice in the discussion about autonomous weapons aka 'killer robots', speaking at the UN in New York and Geneva on the topic. He is a Fellow of the Australia Academy of Science. He appears regularly on TV and radio, and has authored two books on AI for a general audience, the most recent titled 2062: The World that AI Made.

William Dalrymple is a bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, White Mughals, The Last Mughal, Nine Lives, Return of a King: An Indian Army in Afghanistan and Kohinoor, co-written with Anita Anand. He has won several awards, including the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, and has, prior to the shortlisting of Return of a King, been longlisted three times for the Samuel Johnson Prize. His new book is The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Dalrymple is one of the founders and a co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.