Thank you to our sponsors for their generous contributions to the 2022 Overland Subscriberthon!

The Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, sponsored by Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and supporters, recognises the talent of young Indigenous writers across Australia.

The Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, sponsored by Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and supporters, recognises the talent of young Indigenous writers across Australia. The prize, now its sixth year, awards $5000 to one Indigenous writer 30 years or younger and $500 to two runner-up entries. First place also receives a writing residency at Trinity College and publication in Overland's print magazine.

Welcome to the 2021 Overland Subscriberthon – the week where we share great literature and give away prizes every day!

Thank you 2021 sponsors! You’ve made a huge impact on the future of literature in Australia.

Overland is unique in Australian writing in its equal dedication towards formal excellence and incisive argument, and towards foregrounding and amplifying politically marginalised and therefore politically necessary voices. We remain honoured and inspired by the opportunity of this experience, and we hope you come with us on its next and brighter chapter.

Congratulations to our incredible authors, and a special congratulations to our winner!

Thank you to everyone who entered the prize. We received almost five hundred submissions across all categories, and our judges Jeanine Leane, Justin Clemens and Elena Gomez were incredibly impressed by the quality of submissions. Congratulations to our fantastic shortlisted writers.

In 2020, Overland literary journal received funding from Create Victoria to help sustain our organisation and encourage excellence in a struggling arts community. In  honour of the late Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Overland designated a portion of these funds for a new prize rewarding excellence and generosity in Australian writing, irrespective of form and genre.

Overland and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation are thrilled to announce the entries that placed in the 2020 Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize! This year’s star judges, Mirandi Riwoe, Jeanine Leane and Wayne Marshall, rose to the challenging task of selecting a shortlist of eight pieces from over 500 entries, before narrowing the result down to three exceptional stories.

This year’s stellar judges, Bonny Cassidy, Bella Li, Anne-Marie Te Whiu and Toby Fitch (who is also Overland’s poetry editor), read over 900 entries before selecting a shortlist of just eight outstanding works – including poetry from emerging poets such as Sara Saleh, Harry Reid and Declan Fry. The judges then chose four unforgettable poems to place 1st, 2nd and 3rd in this year's prize. The competition was so fierce this year that the judges chose two poems to share 3rd place! 

Why subscribe? Because this year we survived a pandemic and ruthless cuts to arts funding, but we're going to need your help to survive (and thrive) in 2021. Because we will continue to do whatever we can to make sure that all voices are heard, to resist and destroy the systems that deny them, and to drown out the drone of the status quo. Because there's nothing more satisfying than the first time you open a new issue of Overland and you can smell, touch and hear the pages and pages of hope, fury, joy and revolution printed in neatly set, size 12 font.

Hello! My name is Dingo, but everyone calls me Mirri. I was born in country NSW last summer and my parents are Jon and Evie and they do the stuff with the words. This year I moved to Melbourne so they could work at Overland and buy me lots of biscuits and toys. They explained that they won’t always be working at our house and next year I’ll be going to daycare or visiting them at the office, but that’s alright because I’m an intern and I have a very special job – I’m the one that sniffs all of the journals.

Over the years, Overland has given me the same solace as a writer and as a reader. To pick up a print issue is to step in a different, more humane world. That’s what radicalism has always meant to me: the exercise of social imagination so that we can think of the world differently.I have been associated with the Overland for the best part of a decade, and it felt from the very beginning like I had found my people.

This is the kind of fiction that is so exciting to publish in Overland, seeing what might be familiar to us in Australian life as strange and new, with bright and strange colours. ‘Crabs’ is one of the main reasons I wanted to edit fiction for Overland – to discover a writer so exhilarating, with new things to say about Australia. Overland is, I believe, publishing some great new fiction that is just as electrifying, taking us in new directions.

Those of us in Melbourne have been pushed far beyond our limits by one of the most punishing lockdowns in the world, and so many of the rest of us have had a year of unique deprivation, uncertainty, and anxiety. But despite all of that, our first year as co-editors of this unique and necessary journal has been a rich and inspiring experience. We have had the opportunity to work with and support an incomparable cohort of brilliant, searching and provocative writers across a stunning breadth of forms and subjects.