Hanifa Deen is an award-winning third generation Australian writer, of Pakistani ancestry. She has described how one of her grandfathers was a Kashmiri who jumped ship in Melbourne, while the other was a Punjabi small business man who came in the wake of the Afghan camel drivers, who helped to facilitate access to the Australian interior. Her non-fiction books have focused on issues concerning Muslims. Her first book, Caravanserai, portrayed the lives of Australian Muslims. Her second book, Broken Bangles, focused on Muslim women in South Asia. The Crescent and the Pen described the author's journey on the trail of Taslima Nasreen, the author of the controversial novel Lajja, after she fled Bangladesh for Europe. Deen's 2008 book, "The Jihad Seminar" is about Melbourne's first religious hate speech case,. 'Ali Abdul vs The King' was published in 2011 by UWA publishers. In 2013 "The Crescent and the Pen" was extensively rewritten and released as "On the Trail of Taslima" in paperback by Indian Ocean Press. 

Kalgoorlie