After a big year, Overland is taking a little break. The magazine will begin publishing, and considering pitches and pieces, from Monday 11 January.

Thanks

A thousand thanks to all our readers, contributors, submitters and volunteers for making 2015 an excellent and provocative year – the truth is, Overland would be impossible without you.

Thanks, too, to everyone who took out a subscription during Subscriberthon – and check your mailboxes, as the issue should be arriving from today.

If you’re not currently a subscriber, you can buy our hot-off-the-press summer issue, or take out a subscription, just in time for some holiday reading.

New issue

Overland #221 isn’t completely live just yet, but you can read Ben Eltham on the class war in arts funding and Laurie Penny on Facebook polices and ‘truth’ as social media commodity.

If fiction’s more your thing, read the winners of the Victoria University Short Story Prize – Barry Lee Thompson, Jennifer Down and Genevieve Poetka, along with the judges’ report. You can also read the winners of the second year of the Story Wine Prize – Melissa Manning, Zoë Meager and Melanie Pryor, and accompanying judges’ report.

Submit your fiction and poetry

If you’re in a more writerly mood, submit a story for Ben Walter’s upcoming fiction issue of anti-/dis-/un-Australian stories. Challenge the form, challenge the content, or submit those stories you previously thought too experimental for standard print fiction.

You can also enter the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers. This year, the prize, which consists of $5000 and a three-month writing residency at the University of Melbourne’s Trinity College, is looking for the best poem (of up to 88 lines). If you’re not eligible for the prize, send the details onto someone who is.

Heatwave preparation

Finally, in preparation for future heatwaves anywhere in the southern hemisphere, here are the top four films to watch, as voted by an internal Overland straw poll:

1. Chinatown
2. Do the Right Thing
3. Barton Fink
4. Stray Dog / Wake in Fright

Adieu!

We’ll see you in 2016 for more provocation, more print issues, more daily online magazine, more special fiction and poetry issues experimenting with form and style, more prizes and the inaugural Overland writing residency.