Join us for late night shopping and a discussion panel of writers from The Best Australian Science Writing 2025.

The annual collection now in its fifteenth year celebrating the finest voices in Australian science writing. How do insects experience consciousness? Do whales have a language? How liveable are exoplanets and should we care? This much-loved anthology selects the most riveting, entertaining, poignant and fascinating science stories from Australian writers, poets and scientists. The Best Australian Science Writing 2025 anthologises another landmark year in science. From AI to the climate crisis and the changing nature of what science looks like, there’s been plenty of ground to cover. Science writers have been vital in decoding these at times worrying glimpses of the future, and the many solutions that scientists are working on. With a foreword by Scientia Professor Veena Sahajwalla, this collection includes the shortlisted entries for the 2025 UNSW Press Bragg Prize.

Zoe Kean is an multi-award-winning science writer and communicator with a passion for evolution, ecology, and the environment, whose work spans print, radio, TikTok, and stages across the country. She co-edited the Best Australian Science Writing 2025, and her debut book ‘Why Are We Like This?’ was published in 2024. 

Lucinda Duxbury is part PhD student, part accidental poet, and part very excited, very passionate moving ball of chaos. Her writing is inspired by a world filled with wonder, novelty and the crushing weight of the climate crisis. She loves her friends and is scared of breaking expensive lab equipment. 

Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn lives in Tasmania, where she writes, rollerskates and sells flowers. Her recent work appears in Overland, Meanjin, Island and others. Some of her older essays, stories and criticism have won the Scribe Nonfiction Prize, the Ultimo Prize and a fellowship with the Sydney Review of Books. She is currently working on a novel about music and a nonfiction manuscript about fracking. You can usually find her snipping mountain gum on a highway somewhere.

Mark Horstman is a science journalist specialising in polar research, currently with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania. In other lives, he worked as an ecologist with the Kimberley Land Council, and as a broadcaster and documentary-maker for Radio National and ABC-TV (Catalyst). Mark is also a proud co-founder of Tasmanian Inquirer, an online news site.

Join Zoe, Lucinda, Zowie, and Mark at the Afterword Cafe.

This is a free event. RSVPs appreciated but not required — please use the form below.