One of those things turning over in my mind: at a talk last week Scott Monk (author of YA titles such as Raw, The Crush) said that he thinks publishers nowadays are increasingly interested in locating fiction that crosses national boundaries, that isn’t too rigidly located in an Australian setting. Right or wrong it allows your book to be sold in more countries.

Will this crowd out the more peculiarly local stories and does that matter? As a writer I think I’m perhaps always trying to write locally, to get at the more general truths of experience, the old paradox. But not too locally. A factual history of the street I live in wouldn’t reach too many readers.

What is globalisation (and the adjunct economic state) doing to fiction? I haven’t travelled overseas. I haven’t even been to Tasmania yet.