This book offers portholes into the places where writing happens and portals to the new worlds and ways of living it might create. These essays bear witness to the resilience required to commit to the writing life – and to the vital transformative possibilities of literature, for writers, for readers and our culture.

In writing How to Be Between I realised that my story was about much more than hair. It is about claiming an individual identity, and communicating this, but it is also about how we exist in relationship with others, always, and how precious these relationships are. Finding the balance is an ongoing project.

‘Winter begins at three. Blue flakes of light dissolve from the texture of moss-stitch into the porosity of tulle, become so meagre they barely cover anything at all.’

Kefala had been writing down her impressions from the period when her family was first displaced from Romania to Greece after WWII, but the physical journals which provide the raw materials for her published Journals date from the early 1970s (her first poetry collection, The Alien, was published in 1973, her first work of fiction, The First Journey, in 1975).

Wherever home lies, it’s always on borrowed time – a house rented from strangers overseas, or the lease we seem to hold on our own lives. Our first home is the mother’s body; our individual space is always enmeshed with another person’s. We begin our lives connected, however isolated we might become, and several poems in this book dwell on the effects of the maternal bond, its duration and its apparent end, trying to find meaning in loss.

Andrada has been shortlisted for her poetry collection TAKE CARE, while Crawford has been shortlisted for No Document.

Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translated by Tiffany Tsao has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022.

A conversation between author Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao about Happy Stories, Mostly, longlisted for the Booker International Prize.

Happiness requires an endless list of privileges, in any part of the world. It is often the heteros that block us from accessing happiness. We queer are always thrown to the hampir, to the almost, and there the idea of happiness turns into the vampir.

An enduring line running through Acanthus is perhaps one that inevitably moves obliquely or sideways. Looking back now, many of the poems traverse the clarity of a dream-like state: diverting from an imaginary centre and meandering across strange ground.

In the first year that poetry has been eligible for the award, Andrada has been longlisted for her collection TAKE CARE. Crawford has been longlisted for No Document, a groundbreaking work of nonfiction, to be published in the United States this year.

Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions are pleased to announce that The Novel Prize, the biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world, will open for entries for submissions on 1 April 2022.

Praise for The Dancer from Nicholas Jose, Sam Twyford-Moore, Anna MacDonald, Tom Carment, David Malouf and Helen Garner.

HEAT, Australia’s international literary magazine, has relaunched in a new series after a decade-long hiatus. Subscribe and join a community of readers that champions innovative writing from Australia and around the world.

Revenants is a collection of poems about haunted geographies, and extends my earlier work on archival sources, photos and letters, both personal and public. I see myself as an amateur archaeologist exploring the strata of local histories.

Often, for a work to have a sense of ‘aliveness’, writing it has to be just as much a process of discovery for the author as for the reader. While working on Cold Enough for Snow, I suppose I was thinking about several things, and trying to conceive of a form – the simplest possible – where many, or all, could be held to be true at once.