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.
Mark Isaacs is a writer, researcher and community worker. His first book, The Undesirables: Inside Nauru (Hardie Grant, 2014), is an account of his work with asylum seekers in Nauru, one of Australia’s notorious offshore detention centres. His second book, Nauru Burning (Editia, 2016), follows up with an investigative report on human rights abuses on Nauru. Mark is president of Sydney PEN and a PhD candidate focusing on irregular migration at the University of Technology Sydney. He has published articles with The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Sydney Morning Herald, New Internationalist, Griffith Review and many others. markjisaacs.com
