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.

All this is to say, we love what we do. We love that we get to support and give space to emerging and established writers and artists every single day. And here's the main thing – the most sustainable way we can keep supporting writers and artists is through subscriptions! If you subscribe or renew or donate between 13–20 November, you'll go into the draw to win a ridiculous amount of prizes, secure four red hot issues of Overland and help us keep doing what we do into 2021. 

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.