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.
Jumana Bayeh is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University. She is the author of The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora: Representations of Place and Transnational Identity (I.B. Tauris, 2015), several articles on the Arab diaspora fiction and co-editor of a special issue on ‘Arabs in Australia.’ She is currently working on two ARC projects, one that examines the representation of the nation-state in Arab diaspora literature from writers based in Australia, North America and the United Kingdom, and another, with Professors Groth (UNSW) and Murphet (Adelaide), looking at the global resurgence of riots.
