The City Plaza Hotel stands a half hour walk away from the Acropolis in central Athens, nestled in an inner-city alley amongst ageing apartment blocks. Few abnormalities can be registered from outside: the building’s windows emit dim light in the grey morning and clothes are strung along half the balconies on its seven floors. The one outlier is a banner that stretches across three balusters: ‘People are dying in the camps’, it reads, ‘Open Borders. Open Buildings.'

This year’s Stella Count is bleak. The statistics from The Monthly are broadly representative of the count’s wider findings: 65 per cent of authors reviewed were male, and just 5 per cent of published book reviews were men reviewing women authors (whereas 30 per cent were women reviewers covering male authors). The magazine published six times as many long reviews of books by men as it did books by women.