Mykaela Saunders is a Koori and Lebanese writer, teacher, community researcher and the editor of This All Come Back Now, the world’s first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP, 2022).

Mykaela’s fiction, poetry, life writing, critique and research have been widely published, and her work has won the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, the National Indigenous Story Award, the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Prize for Nonfiction and the University of Sydney’s Sister Alison Bush Graduate Medal for Indigenous research. Mykaela is a 2021 Next Chapter recipient for her unpublished manuscript Last Rites of Spring, a psychedelic nightmare in novel form which was also shortlisted for the David Unaipon Award.

Mykaela was born on her Dharug ancestors’ lands in Western Sydney, and grew up between there and in Tweed Heads, in Bundjalung country, community and culture. She belongs to the Tweed Goori community through family and other relationships. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education in various capacities since 2003, and at the tertiary level since 2012. Her research explores her community’s past, present and future. Mykaela is working-class and queer, and she writes for and about the communities she belongs to.