This issue goes to print on the cusp of a darkening world… Overland 255 is the second issue in a suite of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. In this issue, Samuel J Cox interviews Kim Scott on his works True Country (1993) and Benang (1995) in ‘Writing from the South’. Elsewhere, Juliet Scott interrogates ‘The Australian Media’s problem with Palestine’ and Sam Ryan looks back at Overland and the state of arts funding in Australia from 1973 to 1975. This issue also features poetry from Yeena Kirkbright, DJ Huppatz, Debbie Lim, among others, and short fiction from Lauren Collee, Madeline Byrne and Jordan Smith.
Behrouz Boochani is Adjunct Associate Professor of Social Sciences at University of New South Wales (Australia) and writer in residence at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand). He is an author and journalist who was incarcerated as a political prisoner by the Australian government on Manus Island and then held in Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea). In November 2019 he escaped to New Zealand where he was granted asylum in 2020. His book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018) has won numerous awards including the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature. He is also non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney; Visiting Professor at Birkbeck, University of London; member of Border Criminologies, University of Oxford; Honorary (Principal Fellow) within Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne; Honorary Member of PEN International; and winner of an Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya award for journalism. Boochani is also co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time; collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh’s play Manus; and associate producer for Hoda Afshar's video installation Remain (2018).
