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.
James Godfrey is a PhD researcher in Law at Birkbeck College, University of London and visiting at Australian National University. His research examines the Prevent requirement to report perceived radicalisation and its impacts on freedom of speech regarding Israeli Occupied Palestine in universities in England. James has been active in a range of campaigning organisations fighting for social justice, locally and internationally, including as Legal Officer of City of London Anti-Apartheid Group and helping to establish and maintain the Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy in London. James has worked as a trade union organiser in Sydney and London for more than a decade and in the last few years has been employed casually as an academic at Birkbeck, UNSW and University of Sydney.
