I began to think of Baudelaire’s idea of the splénétique as a mood or mode, and whenever I wrote a poem with a more trenchant, urban realist or political bent, I set it aside in a folder on my computer that I’d named ‘Sydney Spleen’.

We’re delighted to share the news that Dr Jenny Grigg was won the ABDA award for Best Designed Literary Fiction Cover for her work on A Body of Water by Beverley Farmer. The judges praised ‘the understated simplicity‘ of Jenny’s cover, its ‘minimal means but maximum effect’.

Ben Juers was highly commended in the Best Designed Young Adult Cover award, with the judges commenting: ‘Innovation is always bound to impress, with The F Team featuring a bold illustration that evokes drama and interesting typographic treatment [which] combine to create an eye-catching cover which breaks the mould of young adult covers.’

Rawah Arja’s debut novel has been shortlisted for the Russell Prize for Humour Writing and the 2021 Readings Young Adult Prize.

To celebrate Mark Anthony Cayanan’s new poetry collection Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous, the author will be joined in a free online conversation about their book on Wednesday 9 June with poet Eunice Andrada.

‘This is a curious poet who opens himself to the world around him. His songs migrate from one word to another, from one language to another. The landscape of his travels becomes a map of his poetry, which, in turn, amounts to a sensitive anthropology of our migratory world.’

Giramondo Publishing will recommence the publication of its renowned literary magazine HEAT in 2022, in a new series, and a new format. We are looking to appoint a skilled and innovative editor to oversee the planning, commissioning and publishing processes of the new HEAT.

Join us to launch Anwen Crawford’s No Document in Melbourne at Dancehouse on Friday 14 May and in Sydney at Gleebooks on Sunday 23 May.

Congratulations to Alice Whitmore, whose translation of Imminence by Mariana Dimópulos is the joint winner of the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize.

The shortlisting of our designer Jenny Griggs, for Beverley Farmer’s A Body of Water, and illustrator Ben Juers for Rawah Arja’s The F Team I take as recognition of the important role design plays in the production of Giramondo’s books.

Anwen Crawford presents an essay in the form of liner notes about the making of No Document.

Several Giramondo authors feature in the 2021 Sydney Writers’ Festival lineup, including Anwen Crawford, Rawah Arja, Yumna Kassab, Felicity Castagna and Fiona McGregor.

Chilean author Bruno Lloret’s novel Nancy, translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones, is reaching new audiences with a US edition published this month by Two Lines Press.

‘My hope is that this book serves as an elegy not only for one specific person but for those, including animals, who have been excluded from the social contract, from the we of belonging. Mourning is always political: the question of who can be grieved, who counts as having lived, is a contested one.’

‘I dealt with this paralysis through subterfuge: one of my fundamental acts of creation was appropriative. Like a modernist or magpie, I stole conflicts and words, embedding passages into poems or actually creating drafts out of swathes I cobbled together from various sources.’

We’re glad to share the video of Pip Adam and Laura Jean McKay, author of the award-winning novel The Animals in That Country, in conversation about Nothing to See. Framing the novel as a meditation on care, they speak to themes of dividing and reforming, loss and loneliness, and embodied experiences of writing and reading.