The Overland Writers’ Residency, supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, is a new initiative aimed at addressing a lack of opportunities for marginalised writers. In 2016, the Overland Writers’ Residency will focus on providing an opportunity for women writers who are also the sole primary carers of one or more children.

Certainly, this entrenched and institutionalised sexism has contributed to Owens’ absence from Scottish literary studies. But there’s another reason, too. When trying to have Gentlemen of the West published, Owens recalls one publisher telling her that ‘people didn’t want that kind of writing ... about poor people’.

The narrator of Bob Dylan’s ‘Highlands’, the rambling, meandering conclusion to his Time Out of Mind, 1996), faces this question during a strangely distracted encounter he’s having with a waitress. For all that her line of enquiry is unexpected – they’ve been discussing his order and sketches until then – the narrator’s response fits a standard, familiar pattern: How would you know, he asks, and what would it matter anyway?

I can’t let the death last week of Australian writer Jessica Anderson go unremarked. Why? Because although she twice won the Miles Franklin Award (1978 and 1980) and her novel Tirra Lirra by the River has been on high school reading lists, Anderson was for most of her long life marginalised, a misfit, a sensitive […]