Fionn McCabe is a cartoonist, printmaker and educator living on Gadigal/Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. He teaches in the Animation and Visual Communication schools at the University of Technology Sydney, and runs workshops for organisations like City of Sydney, Sydney Opera House, Perth Comic Arts Festival, and the Sequential Arts Workshop. He is a co-founder and co-producer of Read To Me, a live visual storytelling event that has showcased the work of hundreds of artists. He is currently one of the two co-directors of Comic Art Workshop, a biennial comics residency for artists working on long form projects. Fionn and some friends also run These Friends, a silkscreen project set up in late 2023 to support artists and art organisations that need a bit of love.

Fionn designed the book-dreaming figures that are the logo emblems for Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2026. He is our moderator for the Read to Me session where cartoonist talk through their work panel by panel, telling their stories live as each frame unfolds. 

Kathy McCabe has been telling the stories of songwriters and musicians, their albums and songs and gigs for over 30 years. She got lucky with a front row seat to witness local artists grow from garages and bedrooms to the world stage. And a side row, restricted view of how the industry ticks. She published her first book Rock Gods this year. Kathy is the moderator for our panel Dream Songs | Music for an Imagined Life.

Philip McLaren was born in the family home at Redfern, NSW, one of seven children. He’s a Kamilaroi man. Both his parents are Kamilaroi from Coonabarabran in the Warrumbungle Mountain region of NSW. As far back as he can remember he has always been an artist and a storyteller. He is the winner of the David Unaipon Award for his debut novel in 1993, Sweet Water – Stolen Land (‘the historical settlement of Australia was not a peaceful thing”). His second novel Scream Black Murder was shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Crime Writers’ Award in 1995: “I chose to write crime fiction because it is a popular genre. I wanted my indigenous characters to portray real blackfella life in Australia, and to address the fact that indigenous murders were not being investigated properly … they were filed at the back of the bottom drawer.” McLaren has continued working in the crime writing genre, exploring everything from hardboiled and mystery to police procedurals and the legal thriller. Some of his other books include Lightning Mine (“I wanted to tackle the mining of sacred sites”) and Utopia (“about the scandalous delivery of medical services in the outback and ritual pay back killings”). More recently he has taken an interest in ‘true crime’ and is now “working on my John Grisham novel dealing with how our Australian justice system deals with indigenous people”.  

Mahdi Mohammadi trained as a theatre director at Kabul University, where he co-founded Papyrus Theatre. Under his leadership, the company was awarded First Prize at the Afghan National Theatre Festival and toured internationally to India and Sweden. Since relocating to Australia, Mahdi has become a vital voice in contemporary performance. He has performed with the PYT Fairfield Ensemble and was a co-devisor and performer in PYT’s Tribunal. His acclaimed co-devised work Dorr-e Dari: A Poetic Crash Course in the Language of Love premiered to a sell-out audience at the Sydney Festival in 2021 and continues to tour nationally. The Sydney Opera House has described Mahdi as an important artist “who’ll define the next 50 years of arts and culture in Australia.” Mahdi has also presented A Moment with Art at PYT Fairfield with the Dorr-e Dari ensemble, a program reflecting on the importance of art and culture in Afghanistan. As part of Vivid Sydney at the Art Gallery of NSW, he contributed to a performance exploring dreams and storytelling from Afghanistan. 

Zeynab Noori is an Afghan Hazara actor, born and raised in Iran, whose cross-cultural upbringing informs her artistic voice and perspective.  She recently completed her training at NIDA Actors Studio, refining her craft as a focused and emotionally grounded performer. 

In 2025, she played the lead role of Sima in Detention, based on the novel by Tristan Bancks and produced by Monkey Baa Theatre Company. The production presented in Riverside Theatres, and toured to Wagga Wagga Civic Theatre and Leeton Roxy Theatre, and was nominated for Best Production for Young People at the 2025 Sydney Theatre Awards. Her previous work includes Longing, Belonging, Belongings with French director Cloe Fournier; Dreams from Afghanistan presented through the Vivid program at the Art Gallery of NSW; and the Analog Program by The Werewolf Arts Company at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery in Nowra. She is also a member of Dorr-e Dari, performing in Bazme Honar, A Moment with Art at PYT, continuing her commitment to sharing Afghan stories. 

Sheila Ngoc Pham is a writer, editor, producer, curator and researcher. She writes for a wide range of literary and mainstream publications and has held editorial roles at the ABC, producing radio documentaries and stories. Sheila previously co-directed the Addi Road Writers’ Festival (2021-2023), and her other curation work includes an exhibition of Đông Hồ paintings (2019) for the State Library of NSW, and most recently, MÌNH (2023) for Fairfield City Museum and Gallery. She is the 2025 Imago Fellow at the State Library of NSW. Sheila recently completed her PhD at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, and is currently working at the University of Sydney’s Reproduction and Perinatal Centre based at Westmead Hospital.

Sheila is the moderator for a unique performance and talk with ‘Dorr-e Dari Artistic Group | A Journey in Theatre and Poetry Between Kabul, Tehran and Sydney’s Merrylands. 

Sarah Runcie is a former CEO of the Brisbane Writers Festival. She has been working in and around the arts sector for 25 years, describing herself as “an avid reader, policy wonk, advocate and constantly curious”. As CEO, she restructured and artistically reinvigorated the Brisbane Writers Festival, contending with the pandemic, border closures and floods. Sarah’s career include founding the Australian Inclusive Publishing Initiative, a world-first in the print disability space.

Sarah is the moderator for the session ‘Afterlife Animals | Art, Spirit and Loss’. 

Kobra Sayyadi is a Hazara-Afghan theatre-maker, writer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Dharawal Country. Blending theatre, poetry, film, and audio, her work explores feeling, belonging, and the spaces in between. She is the co-writer of Detention for Monkey Baa Theatre alongside Wiradjuri artist and theatre-maker Callan Purcell. And a 2023/4 PYT Fairfield Company artist passionate about community-driven storytelling. She currently works as a Community Engagement Assistant at Bell Shakespeare. Kobra comes to ARWF2026 as part of the Dorr-e Dari Artistic Group is a joyful collective of young creators from Afghanistan who bring stories to life through theatre, poetry, music, and thoughtful conversations. Blending Dari and English, tradition and innovation, their work invites people into shared spaces of art, culture, and connection in a hybrid of performance and panel discussion. 

AJ Stanton is a singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist from Sydney who blends blues, jazz, folk, and indie rock. Being a poet at heart, AJ has been described as “mature with a grain of madness”, credit due to her unapologetically quirky and honest songwriting and lyricism. AJ has performed as both a solo artist and with her band at various venues and events across Sydney including King Street Crawl, Lazybones, Ferragosto Festival, the Red Rattler and Summer Hill Festival. She joins us on the day at Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2026 to discuss her influences and ambitions as part of a panel called ‘Dream Songs | Music for an Imagined Life’. AJ Stanton will also take centre stage in one of our ten-minute ‘Hotspots’. 

Dr Sonya Voumard is a nonfiction writer and former political journalist with the Age and SMH. Her book Tremor, about living with a rare movement disorder, won Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 publishing prize in 2024. Her other books include The Media and the Massacre (2016) which was listed for a Nita B Kibble Literary Award and longlisted for a Stella Prize; and Skin in the Game (2018), a collection of essays. Voumard’s work has appeared in Griffith Review, Meanjin and Island. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from UTS where she taught nonfiction writing for many years.  

Jet Williams was born in Sydney in 2000. He grew up in Maroubra and later spent time living in the Northern Territory before returning to Sydney, where he studied Design and Media at the University of New South Wales. In his early twenties, Williams travelled widely and threw himself into countless creative and digital experiments, teaching himself programming, making digital art, trying ideas that rarely went to plan, and documenting his experiences around the world. This period took him from hitchhiking across America to trainsurfing through the Sahara, all while exploring identity and creativity under the pseudonym TEJI. These years of experimentation shaped his multidisciplinary practice and helped him find a community around his work. After years spent travelling, making art, and investing everything he had into ideas he hoped would work, Jet Williams found himself back at home with his parents, broke, in debt, and newly single. Not long after returning, early one morning and unable to sleep, he felt he had nothing left to give except the story he had carried for years. He opened the Notes app on his iPhone and wrote the first lines from his bed for what became his debut novel Off the Rails. 

Jet joins us at Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2026 on the panel ‘Are the Boys Alright? | Men’s Interior Life in Books Today’.