Giramondo Publishing is pleased to announce the appointment of Alexandra Christie as the editor of the third series of HEAT magazine.

From Fiona Kelly McGregor’s essay ‘Looking for Lanny K’ comes ‘a psychedelic mix of Egyptian, Iranian and other West Asian trippy delights from the 1960s and 70s, with contemporary stuff from around the world thrown in’.

‘Across the collection lies a gossamer web that stretches between people, places and the natural world, threads that are gathered and sustained over time. Time in its vagaries and elusiveness is another poetic focus. Beneath the Tree Line recognises that humans need a habitable environment just like plants and animals, something we ignore at our peril.’

‘When you don’t really feel like you have a future, or the sort of future that is available to you seems uncaring and undesirable, then you can get stuck in the past and nostalgia.’

Giramondo is proud to be a participating publisher in Writing NSW’s new program of paid internships for emerging editors, designed to increase cultural diversity in the publishing industry.

Applications are open now, and close on 8 August 2021.

In Gentle and Fierce I reflect on animals, and how my life stories have been shaped by their presence. These essays and illustrations form a discontinuous memoir, based around the animals and animal representations that have expanded my perceptions and sense of self.

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.