The slow cancellation of the future is finally itself undergoing cancellation, disappearing from view. This formerly all-pervasive cultural mood has been robbed of its soporific power by the recent intrusion of queasy possibility, the reminder that, as the old song says, anything could happen and it could be right now.

There is a great risk in the translation of decolonial poetics: namely, of reducing this forging of novelty to a mere relationship of influence, or, at best, a subversion of the Occident. As the complexity of the global is poetically remade in the poets of the Global South, it is necessary they be disseminated in the very languages and spaces of the North that they would remake.

Moving from the Empire of Cartographers and back to Melbourne, Monkey Grip in hand, I walk down streets coextensive with a novel that can only chart what they are and yet can never coincide with their reality. To walk down Easey Street is now never just a walk down Easey Street: for it’s possible that, somewhere in the tarmac under the pinkish-yellow sky, a scrap of writing on which Nora rides her bike might be seen.

The larger industrial factories David Ireland worked at and wrote about needed oceans for their runoff. Those machines are the shape of his second novel, and his first of three to win a Miles Franklin award, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner.

When Iris Murdoch was grieving for her lover Franz Steiner, a few weeks after his death in late 1952, she talked for hours on end with fellow writer and eventual Nobel winner Elias Canetti. It was a foggy London night and Canetti offered her a bed, telling her that she could lock herself into the room where they were talking and he would sleep somewhere else. ‘She looked at me with surprise and disappointment,’ he wrote, and said she would go back to Oxford.

As I returned to À rebours in lockdown I found myself bothered by a raw-red throat and spells of breathless lethargy, eventually joined by worsening digestive function. Leftovers from my own brush with the virus six months prior—or perhaps just results of an extreme lifestyle change, it’s hard to tell.

Jane Eyre remains for many reasons a very English novel. While the force of its critique of patriarchal structures estranges and unsettles the axioms of its context, its political imagination cannot help but remain bordered by Whiteness.

When Muriel Spark met Shirley Hazzard, in the early 1960s, both were rising stars at The New Yorker. Spark, a Scot, was a newcomer to New York. In her early forties, Spark was a decade older than Hazzard, yet they bonded and wrote to each other regularly. Despite being two of the best stylists in English of their era, they often wrote like teenage besties.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that a vast majority of people who do the essential work of keeping things ticking along are largely invisible—save for national emergencies, when all of a sudden cleaners and supermarket workers are wheeled out in front of us to ‘tell us what it’s like’. The idea that these same people have larger lives and stories though, is still something that Australia’s literary world struggles to grasp.

From Arinze Ifeakandu’s decidedly queer-centric fiction to the experimental sound of Fireboy DML’s music, young Nigerians are starting to embrace cultures that used to exist at the fringes of society. They are powered by a bohemian rush, a pressing need to skate down what Kerouac called the ‘senseless nightmare road’.

Percival Everett’s career-defining novel Erasure turns twenty this year. Revisited in 2021, its hyper self-consciousness and metafictional acrobatics have a special resonance, chiming with a historical moment where hysteria and manipulation run rampant.

In truth, we expected little engagement with the question itself, but hoped it might encourage writers to think actively about their proximity to the stories they tell. Our process cannot reverse circumstances of exploitation, appropriation, silencing or other mistreatments of the literatures and experiences of the oppressed and marginalised, nor do we feel it conflates these with all other acts of literary imagination.

I have an intertextual relationship with the internet: my writing practice could not have existed without it, as much as I could not have grown as a person without it. Even if I’m not directly addressing online-ness in my work, I’m always in conversation with it.

If we use current literary prizes as indicators of literary merit and as generators of reading lists, Australian poetry becomes a near ghost, dancing around the edges of the industry and only sometimes allowed in. A future that truly celebrates and champions excellence in Australian poetry is something to fight for and look forward to.

Allegory and Ideology by Fredric Jameson (Verso, 2019) is a book that I’ve been thoroughly looking forward to discussing. It is perhaps the seminal American thinker’s major reflection on literature, or at least his most major reflection on literature since his last major reflection on literature.

In common with many other artists, writers are one of late capital’s most avidly tricked-out assets: not expected to be motivated by crass material concerns themselves, their output nonetheless provides a handy source of wealth for other industries to profit from: industries of marketing, of publishing, of academia.