In the 2018 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize, 863 entries were divided between us, the four judges. From a pooled longlist of thirty stories, we selected a very strong shortlist of thirteen. Then came the difficult task of choosing just two runners-up and one winner. We are thrilled to announce the three stories that placed this year.

Watching Michelle Obama’s rejection of Donald Trump’s misogyny during the recent American presidential campaign, then Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the hands of said misogynist, it was hard not to draw parallels with recent experience in Australia: the apparently powerful naming of sexism, which proved not so powerful that it prevented electoral victory.

The address was voted number three in a 2011 ABC Radio National poll of ‘the most unforgettable speech of all time’, ranked behind, first, Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ and, second, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

There is a well-established tradition of accusatory writing in this country in which a writer currently or previously associated with the Australian Labor Party explains to her or his readers what is wrong with that institution. Given the Party’s strong history of lapsed and lapsing Catholic involvement, curiously less developed has been a tradition of apostatic writing – in which a similarly qualified writer explains why he or she has felt compelled to repudiate the ALP.

Last week’s federal budget is pointing in the same direction as the Overland online debate over the campaign for same sex marriage. They both betray a remarkably broad willingness to assume that leftness has just about run out of uses for the parliamentary movement that labour made.

Another new year has brought another slough of op-eds about how the Australian Labor Party has lost its way in Canberra. Their consensus: soft on narrative, soft on the causes of narrative.

Demanding the Impossible: Seven Essays on Resistance Sylvia Lawson Melbourne University Press Sylvia Lawson’s new book of essays is a strong example of journalism of a kind that Australian public culture does not support well, and which can often miss out on the readers who would enjoy it as result – namely an in-depth reflection, […]

Bendable Learnings reprises a theme that Don Watson established in 2003 with Death Sentence and continued in 2004 with Weasel Words. Over the intervening six years, he has tightened his aim to focus specifically on the managerial jargon that pervades all facets of institutional life.