Shirley Walker is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of New England. She is a Past President of ASAL, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and the Founding Director of CALLS, the Centre for Australian Language and Literature Studies at UNE. She has published four books and numerous critical articles on Australian literature, including a bibliography of the work of Judith Wright.

Judith Arundell Wright was born on 31 May 1915 at Sydney, New South Wales. She studied at the University of Sydney. Wright settled in Brisbane, Queensland, and worked as a statistician at the University of Queensland (UQ) from 1944 to 1948, where she helped Clem Christesen to edit Meanjin. She wrote the first of her poems while working at UQ. Wright met Jack McKinney during her time in Brisbane, and together they moved to Mount Tamborine. They had a daughter, Meredith, in 1950 and married in 1962. Jack died in 1966. Wright was one of Australia's foremost poets, and writers of short stories and children's book. She helped form the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland and was a supporter of the Aboriginal land rights movement. She was a patron of many organisations, including the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, National Forests Action Council (Victoria), Campaign Against Nuclear Power (Queensland), Townsville Women's Shelter and Amnesty International (Victoria). In 1991 she was awarded the Queen's gold medal for poetry. Judith Wright died in Canberra on 26 June 2000.