Overland’s 260th issue is our most substantial yet. At 212 pages, it contains writing from the winners and runners-up of the 2025 Judith Wright poetry and Neilma Sidney short story prizes, as well as last year’s Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers. Across eight short stories, nine poems and five essays, this issue showcases the breadth of talent across generations: Hana Pera Aoake mounts a critique of the economies of First Nations artmaking, asking who exactly benefits when Maōri artists excel within an unregulated market predicated on individualism, while John Kinsella makes an extensive case for unoriginality as both poetic method and political resistance. Elsewhere, Tom Gurn, winner of the 2025 Neilma Sidney prize, imagines a surreal, fractured dialogue between two speakers orbiting loss and urban adaptation. Susie Anderson’s Nakata Brophy winning story follows a Blak elder navigating council rooms as she carries the stories of those who cared for her Country’s waterways. The issue also features new poetry by Ouyang Yu, Dorothy Lune and Dave Drayton, as well as an excerpt from Surveying the Wild Abyss, a new book by Hawkesbury elder and educator Barry Corr.
NOTE: FICTION SUBMISSIONS ARE CURRENTLY CLOSED.
Overland’s current response period is up to 6 months due to the large volume of submissions received. We appreciate your patience as we carefully consider all pieces through multiple readings and endeavour to respond as quickly as possible.
Overland relies on its subscribers for survival. While all work will be read, we cannot guarantee response times to submissions by non-subscribers. You can support Overland by becoming a subscriber.
Overland publishes fiction by new, emerging and diverse writers (and some established authors) with a focus on work that is politically engaged, intellectually challenging and inventive, across a range of genres and styles. We actively look for new work from emerging writers in regional Australia. The payment for stories published in the print journal is $580. Our fiction editor is Claire Corbett.
(Remember, you can support Overland by becoming a subscriber.)
Overland publishes a series of Friday Fiction pieces online throughout the year, selected out of our print fiction submissions and edited by Claire Corbett. We don’t run a separate submission category for this, but if you would like a piece to be considered specifically for online publication, please include a note in your cover letter. Payment for online publication is $180.
The Copyright Agency Ltd is authorised to collect charges for photo and electronic copying of published material. Overland distributes money received for copying in the proportion of 80% to authors and 20% to the publisher. Copyright remains the property of the authors.