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Astrid Edwards_2022

Astrid is an educator and researcher dedicated to social and climate justice. At Future Women she works towards equity and social justice in the workplace, and as a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne she explores the environmental responsibility of the book publishing industry.

Astrid is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and is dedicated to arts and health governance. She currently serves on the Board of Central Highlands Rural Health, a Victorian hospital network.

Astrid is also a bibliophile and literary critic. She founded The Garret: Writing and Publishing and has interviewed more than 250 of Australia’s most prominent writers and publishers. She regularly moderates literary events and judges literary prizes, and was the Chair of Judges for the 2025 Stella Prize. She was also one of Creative Australia’s inaugural Creative Climate Fellows.

She co-founded Bad Producer Productions, an independent podcast company specialising in arts and sport storytelling (she represents the Arts part), with her partner Jay Mueller.

She previously served on the Victorian Disability Advisory Council advising the Minister for Disability, Ageing and Carers (2019 to 2022). She is the former Chair of Melbourne Writers Festival (2019-2022) and the former Deputy Chair of Writers Victoria (2014-2018). She was also a National Advocate for MS Australia (2015-2022).

Between 2018 and 2024 Astrid taught in the Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University, and served as Program Coordinator for two of those years.

In 2021 Astrid contributed to the anthology Growing Up Disabled in Australia and made her debut appearance on Q+A in 2021. You can read her book reviews in The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. She previously received grants from the Australia Council for the Arts (2017 and 2018) and The Copyright Agency (2017 and 2019).

Before embarking on this creative storytelling career, Astrid was an economics and policy consultant for almost a decade. She specialised in climate and social policy, and to this day she is trying to figure out how stories can help to save the planet.

You can track her reading on The StoryGraph.

I acknowledge the Dja Dja Wurrung people as the Traditional Owners of the land on which I live and work.

I respectfully recognise Elders past, present and future.

Sovereignty was never ceded. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land.