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.
A Wiradjuri woman from Central New South Wales, Kerry Reed-Gilbert has performed and conducted writing workshops nationally and internationally. She was the inaugural Chairperson of the First Nations Australians Writers Network (FNAWN). In 2013 she co-edited a collection of works with the US Mob Writing (UMW) group ‘By Close of Business’, and was co-editor for the Ora Nui journal, a collaborative collection between First Nations Australia writers and Maori writers.
Kerry is a former member of the Aboriginal Studies Press Advisory Committee. Her poetry and prose have been published in many journals and anthologies nationally and internationally, including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and Southerly. She is a member of the ACT Us Mob Writing group and First Nations Australia Writers’ Network.
