Angelo Loukakis, writer, editor, publisher, teacher and literary activist, starts as executive director of the Australian Society of Authors on 18 January 2010.

As he begins his new job as advisor, advocate, counsellor and strategist to our 3,000 national members, we see that each segment of his career has been filled with achievement. He won a 1981 NSW Premier's Prize for his short-story volume For the Patriarch. His novels include The Memory of Tides and his non-fiction books Making a Difference, co-authored with Peter Beattie, then Queensland Premier and Who Do You Think You Are? based on the SBS TV series.

His plays include My Father Was A Weightlifter and Enemy Aliens and his television screenplays the SBS drama series The Girl From Steel City.

He understands both sides of the publishing street, was publisher at HarperCollinsPublishers Australia from 1993 to 1999 and publishing director at Simon & Schuster from 1999 to 2001 and has worked as freelance editor and manuscript assessor for Penguin Books, Random House, Allen & Unwin, ABC Books, University of Queensland Press, Pluto Press and others.

He has taught writing, publishing and editing at the University of Technology, Sydney, chaired the New South Wales Writers' Centre and served as judge of the NSW Premiers' Literary Awards. We hope that as ASA executive director at a time when the industry is changing in ways nobody, not even Google, can predict, he will add a new dimension to a brilliant career. We now start the process to find his replacement as editor of Australian Author.

- Robert Pullan, ASA chair.