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.
Rebecca Hill is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne. She is the author of The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle and Bergson (Fordham, 2012) and the co-editor of Philosophies of Difference: Nature, Racism and Sexuate Difference (Routledge, 2018). Her research engages with the concepts of difference, time, place and sexual difference in decolonial theory, Australian Indigenous philosophy, continental philosophy, feminist theory and queer theory. She is a founding convenor of the Melbourne-based Philosophies of Difference (PoD seminars).
