Dementia, war, migration and loneliness are among the themes of the six novels selected for this year’s Miles Franklin award, Australia’s most esteemed literary prize, worth $60,000.

Announced on Wednesday, the 2026 shortlist includes four first-time nominees, two of whom are debut novelists: Brisbane-based Steve MinOn for First Name Second Name and Tasmania-based Konrad Muller for My Heart At Evening.

Second novels from Omar Musa (Fierceland) and Sean Wilson (You Must Remember This) are also in contention for the award, as are Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline and Josephine Rowe’s Little World.

This year’s judging panel said the shortlist showed that Australian novels can “grapple with the most vexing and profound questions of our time”.

“Grand and intimate, these novels sing the Australian experience into new shapes,” the judges said.

Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline, which won the people’s choice award at the 2026 Victorian Premier’s literary awards, was described as “both a taut political thriller and a humane meditation on the way that Australia must continue to find ways of working through agonising conflicts”.

The Palestinian Australian author was disinvited from Adelaide writers festival earlier this year, leading to the event being boycotted by hundreds of writers and subsequently cancelled. In April, Abdel-Fattah cut ties with publisher University of Queensland Press, joining at least 16 other authors who ended their contracts or vowed not to work with the publisher again after it cancelled its publication of Jazz Money’s Bila, A River Cycle over comments by the book’s illustrator.

MinOn’s First Name Second Name follows a dead protagonist as he encounters four generations of family estrangements to recover his lost identity. Judges called it “complex and timely” for its questions about “who gets to be a settler and who remains a migrant in Australia”.

Judges said Josephine Rowe’s “slender novel” Little World, partially set in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and covering themes of desire, loss, loneliness and faith, was “beautifully compressed”.

Omar Musa’s Fierceland was called “ambitious” for its story of two siblings grappling with the burden of inheritance and legacy. “Fierceland is a psychologically layered and storied reckoning with the world we have inherited,” they said.

My Heart At Evening, Konrad Muller’s mystery set in 1832 Tasmania, is a “complex novel”, remarked the judges, which “reveals the power of literature to centre the discomfort of this settler colony’s past and present”.

Sean Wilson’s You Must Remember This, which is narrated in first-person by a woman who is steadily losing her memory, “shows us that dementia is a process still fully situated in the tissue of significance,” said the judges, “without romanticising its real losses.”

Each shortlisted author receives $5,000 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Last year’s winner was Siang Lu for his sprawling, ambitious novel Ghost Cities.

The Miles Franklin literary award will be announced on 5 August.

The 2026 Miles Franklin shortlist

• Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah (University of Queensland Press)

• First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn (University of Queensland Press)

• My Heart At Evening by Konrad Muller (Evercreech Editions)

• Fierceland by Omar Musa (Penguin Random House Australia)

• Little World by Josephine Rowe (Black Inc)

• You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson (Affirm Press)

Zeno Sworder’s beautifully illustrated picture book Once I Was a Giant, which tells the tale of a tree transformed into a pencil who writes its own story, has won book of the year at the 2026 Australian Book Industry Awards.

It’s the Melbourne writer and illustrator’s third children’s book, following My Strange Shrinking Parents (2023) – winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary prize; and This Small Blue Dot (2021), which took home best new illustrator at the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards.

Sworder’s hopeful and poetic bedtime read, written for ages zero to six, covers the span of a tree’s life and its relationships with the world around it. It also won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary award for children’s literature in February, with the judges calling it “profoundly moving” with “glowing illustrations”.

At a ceremony in Sydney on Thursday night, the beloved children’s writer Mem Fox was recognised in the hall of fame for “outstanding service to the Australian book industry”. Earlier this year, Fox’s classic Possum Magic was voted No 2 in Guardian Australia’s reader poll of the best Australian picture book of all time. Author and former bookseller Paul Macdonald, who owned the Children’s Bookshop in Sydney for close to two decades, was also honoured in the hall of fame.

The annual awards, now in its 26th year, are judged by more than 50 representatives from publishing houses, distributors, literary journalists, agents, booksellers and librarians.

Winners of the adult book categories included Sally Hepworth’s thriller Mad Mabel, which was presented with the general fiction and the audiobook awards; Geraldine Brooks’ memoir Memorial Days, which won in the biography category; and the Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, which won the prize for general nonfiction.

A Piece of Red Cloth, a collaborative historical novel written by Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymura, about a Yolŋu elder trying to protect their granddaughter from being kidnapped, won social impact book of the year.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy won the literary fiction book of the year, and the Matt Richell award for new writer of the year was awarded to Angie Faye Martin for crime drama Melaleuca.

A “highly original” nonfiction by Melbourne historian Clare Wright, charting the creation of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions – a seminal moment in Australia’s history of land rights – has won book of the year at the NSW literary awards.

The Petitions were landmark documents presented by Yolŋu elders to the Australian parliament in 1963 on painted bark frames, which sought government intervention after a portion of Arnhem Land Reserve was licensed to a French mining company. Though it didn’t halt mining on the land, the petitions led to the first land rights legislation in Australia, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

Written more like a novel than a historical nonfiction, Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions treats its subjects as characters, bringing the reader along with their political aspirations and acts of resilience, without the sense of inevitability that usually accompanies a work of history.

At a ceremony at the NSW state library on Monday night, Näku Dhäruk won the $10,000 top prize along with the $40,000 Douglas Stewart prize for nonfiction. Judges called the book “a work of national significance”, saying the personal accounts included in the narrative felt “vividly alive” with “an extraordinary depth of research and sophisticated scholarship”.

“It is a book that should be read by all Australians,” judges said.

Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions is the third in Wright’s “democracy trilogy” about three defining moments in Australia’s political history, including the 2014 Stella prize-winning Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, which shares the stories of women who united during the 1850s Eureka Stockade, and You Daughters of Freedom, about white Australian women winning the right to vote.

Wright, who was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2020 for her outstanding “service to literature, and to historical research”, has already picked up multiple awards for Näku Dhäruk, including the 2025 Australian Political book of the year. Speaking to Guardian Australia before she knew she had won the main prize at the NSW literary awards, the author joked that her book’s cover design is now “more stickers than cover”. “If it was a bottle of wine, you would be buying a case,” she said, laughing.

Wright spent a decade writing Näku Dhäruk. She calls the 640-page work “collaborative”, speaking of her time living and working with the Yirrkala community.

“The Yolŋu people wanted me to tell it because they wanted Australia to know their story,” she said. “Readers who have spent time in north-east Arnhem Land with Yolŋu people tell me that [reading the book] felt like going home, it felt like being … in that very special remarkable part of the world.”

The La Trobe University professor is considered a culturally adopted member of the Yunupiŋu family, she said; it was 1978 Australian of the Year Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu who gave Wright the language title of the book in 2020. Näku means “bark” and Dhäruk means “the word” or “message” in Yolŋu matha (tongue).

“There was a lot of nervousness as to whether the Australian public would be able to cope with a book that had a language title,” Wright said. The fact that it’s had its fourth print in just over a year is proof “there is a hunger and a desire to read stories that enrich our sense of the nation’s past”.

Other winners on Monday night included Moreno Giovannoni, who won the $40,000 Christina Stead prize for fiction for The Immigrants – “an absolute gem of a novel,” said the judges, which blends fiction and family memoir.

The Multicultural NSW award went to playwright S Shakthidharan for Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath, a “lyrical” book that “expands the genre of memoir”, the judges said.

In the children’s book categories, Gone by Michel Streich won the Patricia Wrightson prize for children’s literature and Marly Wells and Linda Wells shared the Ethel Turner prize for young people’s literature for Desert Tracks.

The Black Woman of Gippsland by Andrea James took home the Nick Enright prize for playwriting, and the Betty Roland prize for scriptwriting went to Shaun Grant for episode four of the drama miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The Kenneth Slessor prize for poetry was awarded to Jill Jones for How to Emerge, which judges said was “a mastery of catalogue and repetition”.

The Indigenous Writers’ prize went to Natalie Harkin for Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea, praised for covering “a brutal chapter in our history”, about First Nations women being used as indentured servants in South Australia.

Micaela Sahhar won the UTS Glenda Adams award for new writing for a “deeply moving, confronting and life-affirming book”, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. And the University of Sydney’s people’s choice award went to Emily Maguire for the author’s “rapturous” prose in historical novel Rapture.

Award‑winning author Craig Silvey has pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child exploitation material, while a charge that he produced such material has been dropped.

Silvey, 43, was first charged in January after detectives from Western Australia police’s child abuse squad raided his Fremantle home, allegedly catching him communicating online with child exploitation offenders and seizing his electronic devices.

Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email

The father of three was later hit with extra charges, including allegations he produced child exploitation material between February and June 2022, and possessed further material on 12 January this year.

Those two additional charges have now been discontinued, and Silvey has admitted the remaining counts of possessing and distributing child exploitation material linked to offences in January.

Silvey faced Fremantle magistrates court on Tuesday, when he entered guilty pleas.

The popular author is best known for his 2009 coming‑of‑age novel Jasper Jones, considered a modern Australian classic and adapted into a feature film and several stage productions.

He has also been widely recognised for other books, including Rhubarb, Honeybee – winner of the 2021 Australian Indie Book Award – and the children’s novel Runt, which was also made into a film.

Publishers Allen & Unwin and Fremantle Press, which released Rhubarb, stopped promoting his books after the original charges were laid and most of his titles were removed from reading lists across the country.

Silvey’s bail was continued, and he is next due to appear in the district court on 3 July for sentencing.

David Malouf, the acclaimed Australian author of books including Ransom, An Imaginary Life and the Booker prize-nominated Remembering Babylon, has died aged 92.

Malouf died on Wednesday, his publisher, Penguin Random House Australia, said in a statement on Thursday.

“We are deeply saddened to share that author and poet David Malouf AO has passed away,” the statement said. “David Malouf wrote across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, libretti and plays, and made a significant and continued impact on Australian literature.”

“David won numerous prizes for his work, including the Miles Franklin Award, Commonwealth Writers’ prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and Australia-Asia Literary Award. He was also an admired teacher and lecturer both in Australia and Europe.”

“Alongside his achievements as a writer, David was a loyal, loving friend to many and devoted to his family. He was a passionate supporter of Opera Australia, Adelaide Writers Week and the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.”

Born in Brisbane in 1934 to a Lebanese Australian father and an English-born mother of Portuguese and Sephardic Jewish descent, Malouf was an avid reader at an early age, reading the complete works of Shakespeare from the age of 10.

Malouf began writing poetry, usually about his childhood, his family, travelling and his connections to Europe and Australia; his first work was published in 1962. He was also known as a gifted short story writer, publishing five collections over three decades.

His first novel, 1975’s Johnno, was semi-autobiographical, following a young man growing up in Brisbane during the second world war.

His 1993 book, Remembering Babylon, made him a literary name: the tale of a young shipwreck survivor rescued and raised by Aboriginal people was shortlisted for the Booker prize. It also won the Commonwealth writers’ prize and the first International Dublin Literary award.

Much of Malouf’s writing focused on the past – his own childhood, on great myths, on colonial Australia.

“He has a poet’s sensibility, but there is nothing brazenly poetic about his prose,” Rick Gekoski wrote in the Guardian in 2011.

“One is constantly astonished by the vivacity and accuracy of the writing, and it is hardly possible to read a page of Malouf without a smile of delight and gratitude.”

Malouf’s final novel, Ransom, was published in 2009, after a 13-year gap between novels. The book, a retelling of Priam’s appeal to Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body in the Iliad, received acclaim around the world and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary award. Malouf’s final published book was a volume of poetry, An Open Book (2018).

Malouf was also a fan of opera, sitting on the board of Opera Australia and writing criticism and several libretti himself, including an adaptation of Patrick White’s Voss.

The author was gay, and openly so for much of his life, but remained discreet in his relationships before and after fame arrived; close friends reported not knowing anything about his personal life.

He was often hailed by critics and other authors as a great chronicler of Australia, uniquely capturing something of its innate character, which he rejected.

“I don’t consider myself a representative Australian and I’m not a representative Queenslander,” he once said.

“I think each one of us is individual and we take exactly what suits us best. Whether we’re men, women, gay or ethnic, we take up what we can use. I think that’s one of the great privileges of being Australians. We have that kind of freedom and we’ve given up, I hope, the very narrow idea we have to think of ourselves as Australians. We can be whatever we want to be.”

Acclaimed Australian author Helen Garner said she would remember Malouf for his kindness, encouragement and love of laughter.

“David gave me a great deal of encouragement when I was starting out,” Garner said.

“He knew how to be useful when he saw a friend going down for the third time in a mess of her own making: his kindness in a crisis was imaginative and very practical. He was witty and he loved to laugh. In recent years our lives changed direction and we drifted apart. Foolishly, I imagined he would live on for ever in his high apartment up there in Surfers (Paradise). I’m shocked and sad to hear that he’s gone.”

The literary journal Meanjin will return to the city it was born in that bears its Indigenous name.

The Queensland University of Technology announced on Wednesday it had acquired the 85-year-old journal, whose life was cut short by Melbourne University Press in September.

QUT’s successful bid marked a full circle for Meanjin, which was founded in Brisbane/Meanjin by Clem Christesen in 1940 before moving to Melbourne in 1945.

The QUT vice-chancellor, Prof Margaret Sheil, said the new ownership agreement committed to maintaining the journal’s rigorous standards by safeguarding its editorial independence and the appointment of a dedicated editorial board.

“Meanjin has been instrumental in shaping Australian literary and intellectual culture for decades,” Sheil said. “It has provided a vital platform for critical discussion, a showcase of emerging writers and a valuable training ground for leading Australian publishers and editors. We are honoured to be entrusted with the legacy of this cultural icon.”

A competitive nationwide search will be launched to recruit a new editor.

Nagi Maehashi, the celebrated cook behind RecipeTin Eats, has announced the death of her beloved canine companion, Dozer, on Sunday, saying the cover star of her bestselling cookbooks would be missed “forever”.

Dozer, a golden retriever, was Maehashi’s supporting star on her hyper-popular cooking blog and featured in many images and stories in her two books: Tonight and Dinner. Dinner was released in 2023, and became the fastest-selling cookbook in Australian publishing history. Maehashi’s blog receives more than 500 million hits each year.

On social media, Maehashi said Dozer, who was 13, was hospitalised at the vet in January with a lung infection, which was complicated by his older age and existing medical conditions.

He died last Thursday, a few month shy of turning 14.

“Dozer was many things to many people,” Maehashi wrote on Instagram. “But to me, he was just my baby boy who loved me unconditionally. I loved him fiercely and completely and I will carry that with me forever. Thank you Dozer, for the best years of my life. I will love you and miss you forever.”

Allow Instagram content?

This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’.

The cook added that she had struggled to respond to people’s words of support after Dozer’s death.

“I know there will come a time when I can look at photos of Dozer again without sobbing. I just need to get through this grieving phase,” she wrote in an Instagram story. “And I know all these tears are because I loved him so much, and I wouldn’t trade this pain for a second that I got to spend with him.”

“I will be back soon with smiles and laughter and lots of good food. Dozer would not have it any other way.”

Maehashi shared some of her recent memories of Dozer in a blog posts during his hospitalisation, saying one of his preferred treats had become a plain water ice block.

“Funny how much the bar drops when you’re in hospital, gourmet expectations reduced to frozen tap water and he’s living his best life.”

A seventh book in Rachel Reid’s gay romance series that inspired the TV drama Heated Rivalry will be out later this year but Australian fans are still struggling to get their hands on a physical copy of any of the preceding six books.

Unrivalled, the next instalment in the Canadian author’s Game Changers series, will be released internationally on 29 September, the publisher HarperCollins announced on Tuesday.

The wild success of the screen adaptation has driven a level of interest in the books that rivals that of Bridgerton, booksellers have told Guardian Australia, with paperback copies of the first two novels selling out within a day and backorders piling up.

“No one has it in stock, not even the publisher!” a Dymocks spokesperson said.

Heated Rivalry launched on HBO Max on 28 November and follows the sexual encounters and budding romance of two closeted athletes, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, competing in a hypermasculine ice hockey league. It is based on the first two of Reid’s novels, 2018’s Game Changer and 2019’s Heated Rivalry. The seventh novel will continue the story of Shane and Ilya.

The books were initially released in ebook format, standard practice for romance and for Reid’s publisher, the Harlequin imprint Carina Press. The whole series received a trade paperback release in the US in 2024 but, by the time the TV show launched, many fans were complaining that physical copies of the books were impossible to find.

A spokesperson for HarperCollins Australia said the novels had been available in Australia and New Zealand in ebook and audiobook format before December and the company had acquired print rights for Australia and New Zealand “as soon as we heard that the series was coming to HBO Max in Australia in late November”.

“We went to print immediately and print copies of books one and two were available from 18 December, with books three through six available from Tuesday 27th January,” the spokesperson said. “The delay was due to the printer being closed over the Christmas break.”

That initial print run was not remotely enough for what booksellers said was a level of interest that rivalled Bridgerton.

A spokesperson from Dymocks told Guardian Australia the bookseller’s initial stock of Game Changer and Heated Rivalry had sold out within a day.

“We currently have significant customer orders for the next shipment, plus similar numbers for the next four books in the series due out in a couple of weeks,” the spokesperson said. “It’s been our most-searched title online every week since mid-December.”

_{Sign up: AU Breaking News email}

Dymocks said reprints were due to arrive in store next week and the store hoped to have stock available before next weekend, provided there were no shipping delays.

Sophie Higgins, the head of merchandise at Booktopia, said the store had been selling more than 100 copies a day of the paperback editions of the series, including those that haven’t been released in print yet, and had sold more than 10,000 copies so far. All six books in the series had been in Booktopia’s top 10 bestsellers since the show began airing, Higgins said, and the level of interest in the ebooks had been similar.

“We’ve seen this kind of sudden demand at Booktopia before for series like Fifty Shades of Grey, driven by word of mouth and social media buzz,” Higgins said. “The other example of a series that had been out for years and was even out of print before the Netflix series aired is the Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn.”

Nick Croydon, the chief executive of QBD Books, said there had been a “clear and sustained surge in interest” in the books since the TV adaptation launched in November.

“What’s notable is that this interest extends beyond the currently released titles, with readers actively searching for and preordering books across the full series,” Croydon said. “The entire series landed in our top 20 searched books for the month.”

The series had also generated more online product reviews than the July release of a limited-edition Fourth Wing special by Rebecca Yarros, which Crydon said was “a benchmark moment for romantasy readership in Australia”. It had also exceeded the engagement levels of the Arnott’s Cookbook, which went viral in October, by 19%.

“This places Heated Rivalry firmly within the realm of culturally driven book phenomena rather than a typical genre release,” Croydon said, suggesting that the series is “breaking out beyond its core romance audience” and indicating “a long-term series obsession rather than a short-lived spike”.

HarperCollins told the New York Times in December that 650,000 books had been sold in the Game Changers series, though the publisher did not distinguish between ebook and paperback editions. Its executive vice-president Brent Lewis said: “The community around these books felt like a small town before the show. Overnight, it became a big city. We couldn’t be happier for Rachel.”

Reid has not commented publicly on the shortfall in print copies, with the exception of responding “I’m with you 😖” to an Instagram post in December by a fellow romance writer and critic, Ella Dawson, that begged HarperCollins to print more copies.

Australia’s first and, so far, only female prime minister, Julia Gillard, is set to chair the UK’s Women’s prize for fiction in 2026.

The annual award is for the best full-length novel of the year written in English by a woman and published in the UK. The £30,000 prize, which has previously been known as the Orange prize and the Baileys prize, has run since 1996.

In a statement, Gillard said, “Reading fiction has always been my most treasured pastime. From the simple story books of childhood to the most vaunted works of literature, and every type of page turner in between, reading has given me refuge, expanded my imagination and cultivated my understanding.”

“There have been times in my life when I had too little time for reading, now I am delighted to have the opportunity to plunge headlong into many vibrant works of fiction by women and to work with a joyful panel of judges to highlight the books that really speak to us and shine.”

Gillard has long had ties to the UK: she was born in Wales in 1961, and her family moved to Australia in 1966. Serving as Australia’s prime minister from 2010 to 2013, since 2021 she has been chair of the board of governors at the UK health research charity the Wellcome Trust.

Joining Gillard on the judging panel will be the poet and novelist Mona Arshi; writer, poet and former BBC Radio presenter Salma El-Wardany; actor and comedian Cariad Lloyd; and DJ and broadcaster Annie Mac.

The former Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire will serve as chair of judges for the £30,000 Women’s prize for nonfiction, which was first awarded in 2024.

“There is so much quality nonfiction being written by women across a wide range of topics, and yet too often – and for too long – this writing has been ignored. After 26 years in work tackling violence against women, it is distressing to see women’s rights being rolled back,” Debbonaire said, calling reading and writing “hugely important tools for action”.

The other judges on the nonfiction panel are the engineer and author Roma Agrawal; founder of wellness company Neom Wellbeing Nicola Elliott; novelist Nina Stibbe; and judge and thriller author Nicola Williams.

Last year’s fiction prize was won by the Dutch author Yael van der Wouden for her debut, The Safekeep, while the nonfiction prize was won by the doctor and writer Rachel Clarke for The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and a Medical Miracle.

The longlist for the 2026 Women’s prize for fiction will be announced on 4 March, and the shortlist on 22 April. The nonfiction prize longlist will be announced on 11 February and the shortlist on 25 March.

The winners of both prizes will be revealed on 11 June.

One of Australia’s longest running literary journals has been scrapped, in what has been described as an act of “utter cultural vandalism” on the part of the University of Melbourne.

After 85 years, Meanjin, run by the university’s subsidiary Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), will publish its last edition in December. Although the journal’s editor, Esther Anatolitis, worked her last day at Meanjin on Thursday, the spring and summer quarterly editions of the journal are already at the printers.

In a statement, the MUP chair, Prof Warren Bebbington, confirmed Meanjin’s demise, saying it was “a matter of deep regret”.

“The decision was made on purely financial grounds, the board having found it no longer viable to produce the magazine ongoing,” the statement said.

“The two part-time staff of Meanjin were not involved in the decision, which led to their being made redundant this week.”

Bebbington told Guardian Australia that MUP and Anatolitis, who was contacted by the Guardian but declined to comment, had agreed to the wording of the statement, and he declined to confirm that the editor had signed a non-disclosure agreement as part of her redundancy package.

Bebbington also scotched speculation that any pressure was brought to bear on MUP by the University of Melbourne Council, led by the current chair of the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, after Meanjin ran an essay highly critical of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and its unequivocal support for Israel’s incursion into Gaza in its last spring edition. The article was written by the Melbourne academic Max Kaiser, a co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia, set up in opposition to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry over the Gaza conflict.

“That’s all completely wrong,” Bebbington said.

“MUP is independent, it makes its own decisions about its publications, and I doubt that the university’s council has even discussed Meanjin this year. There has certainly been no discussion, no communication, with them.”

_{Sign up: AU Breaking News email}

The former Labor politician, polymath and one of the National Trust’s Australian Living Treasures, Barry Jones, a regular contributor to Meanjin, has accused the University of Melbourne of muzzling the publication’s editor.

“[Anatolitis] has been exemplary as an editor … and I think she’s been put in an absolutely atrocious situation,” Jones told the Guardian. “Worst of all is the cone of silence that’s been imposed on her, and that’s awful. Universities ought to be promoting diversity, not shutting down debate. This is a very disturbing pattern. I’d like to think it could be reversed, but knowing the way universities operate these days, I doubt it will be. It’s an act of utter cultural vandalism on a large scale.”

A spokesperson for the University of Melbourne said its council was not involved in the decision to close Meanjin, nor were any individual members of the university council involved in the decision.

“The council was only informed after MUP had made its decision to close Meanjin,” the statement said.

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance said the MUP board’s claim that Meanjin is closing because it has become financially unviable “doesn’t add up”.

“The publication recently secured a $100,000 grant from Creative Australia to fund its next two years of operation,” the MEAA media director, Cassie Derrick, said in a statement provided to the Guardian.

“At a time when writers and creatives are increasingly facing censorial voices, the frank and fearless writing Meanjin has always published is more important than ever.”

The former MUP chief executive Louise Adler, director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, who along with five MUP board members resigned in protest in 2019, also expressed scepticism over the publisher’s claims the journal had become financially unsustainable.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

“The costs of running Meanjin were insignificant in the university’s budget,” she told the Guardian.

“It is very easy to cut cultural projects – low sales, declining subscriptions, a lack of funding all provide the rationale philistines are looking for. But with every cultural institution that disappears, the opportunities for writers decline and the literary fabric of our nation is diminished.”

Meanjin, which came under the governance of MUP in 2008, has been revered as a scholarly peer-reviewed journal since its establishment in Brisbane by the journalist Clem Christesen in 1940. In 1945 the publication relocated to Melbourne and Christesen continued to serve as its editor for almost three decades.

It is credited for publishing myriad essays and works of fiction and poetry by emerging writers over the decades, as well as attracting the cream of Australian literary talent. Among its contributors were Patrick White, Randolph Stow, Frank Moorhouse and Thomas Keneally, who told the Guardian on Thursday that Meanjin had been with him all his life and its editor was a cultural asset.

“It is a matter for lament that a journal of such repute and consistent commentary cannot be permitted to have an assured place amongst us,” he said.

In the field of poetry, Meanjin’s lengthy list of contributors include Judith Wright, AD Hope, Les Murray and Sarah Holland-Batt.

Holland-Batt told the Guardian the closure of Meanjin would come as an “enormous loss” to Australian literature.

“It’s quite devastating, really. I’m shocked,” she said.

“It’s become such a mainstay of Australian literature, and it’s a place where so many Australian writers and poets have had their first publications. Meanjin was always the lodestar young people were hoping to publish in.

“All efforts should be made to save it because of the prestige it brings to MUP and to Melbourne University. It’s a real pearl of Australian literature and it’s just an incalculable loss.”

This article was amended on 4 September 2025. The MEAA initially said Meanjin had received a $2m grant from Creative Australia. The MEAA then provided an updated statement with the correct amount, $100,000.