Overland 254 is the first in a set of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. This issue also launches a new design and format by Common Room Editions, inspired by Overland’s trove of radical literature spanning from 1954 to today. Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange consider the asymmetrical responses to two events: the wearing of keffiyehs by three cast members during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, and, on the same day in the US, the shooting of three Palestinian men wearing keffiyehs. Jeff Sparrow uncovers the Sydney Herald’s legacy of Terra Nullius, and Daniel Lopez writes on Marx, Meredith and the festival as an inversion of modern life.
Rúnar Helgi Vignisson is an Icelandic author and translator who has won many honours for his writing, among them The Icelandic Translation Award for JM Coetzee’s Boyhood. Vignisson has translated books by many acclaimed American, English and Australian authors, such as Philip Roth, Amy Tan, William Faulkner, Ian McEwan and Elizabeth Jolley. He is the author of seven books of fiction; his newest book, Love and Other Complications, was published in 2012 and won one of the most prestigious literary prizes in Iceland, The DV Cultural Prize for Literature. His short stories have been featured in Icelandic, German, and Spanish anthologies. Vignisson is currently director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Iceland.
