Roanna Gonsalves is an award-winning writer and educator. She was born and raised in Mumbai, India, and now lives in Sydney, Australia. She was the inaugural recipient of The Bridge Awards’ Varuna – Cove Park Writing Residency 2019. She served on the Board of Writing NSW (2018-2023) and has been a judge / assessor of over 30 literary prizes/grants including the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (Fiction), the ARA Historical Novel Prize, and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. In recognition of her expertise she is often invited to publicly interview/be in conversation with many literary superstars, Booker-prize winners and local and international authors. She is the editor of Southerly, Australia’s oldest literary journal. She works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UNSW, Sydney. Her novel The Servants (which she worked on at Cove Park in 2019) will be published by Summit Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in 2026.