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.

AFSCME, cultural organizations ask court to reinforce IMLS protection

Sep 04 2025

On September 3, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and a coalition of library, museum, and cultural organizations filed an amicus brief in Rhode Island v. Trump, stating their solidarity with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Twenty-one states’ attorneys general filed the case on April 4, and as of May 13, Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the U.S. District Court of the District of Rhode Island had ordered a halt to the gutting of IMLS and two other federal agencies.

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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.”

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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.

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“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.

Sally Rooney, Arundhati Roy and Rachel Kushner are among more than 1,000 writers and publishing professionals who have signed a letter pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians”.

Signatories to the pledge say they will not work with Israeli publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights”, including operating “discriminatory policies and practices” or “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide”.

Institutions that have never publicly recognised the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law” will also be boycotted.

The campaign was organised by the Palestine festival of literature (also known as PalFest), which runs an annual festival with free public events in cities across Palestine, alongside campaign groups Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Publishers for Palestine, Writers Against the War on Gaza and Fossil Free Books.

“We, as writers, publishers, literary festival workers, and other book workers, publish this letter as we face the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century,” begins the statement, which goes on to say that Israel has killed “at the very least 43,362” Palestinians in Gaza since last October, and that this follows “75 years of displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid”.

Culture “has played an integral role in normalising these injustices”, it says. Israeli cultural institutions, “often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades”.

Industry workers have a “role to play”, states the pledge. “We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” it reads, noting that “countless authors” took the same position against apartheid in South Africa.The letter ends with a call to the signatories’ peers to join the pledge.

In response to the letter, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), an association of lawyers supporting Israel, has sent its own letter to the Society of Authors, the Publishers Association and the Independent Publishers Guild. “This boycott is plainly discriminatory against Israelis. The authors do not impose similar conditions on publishers, festivals, literary agencies or publications of any other nationality,” the UKLFI alleged, adding that its members believe there are legal risks involved in participating in the boycott.

Omar Robert Hamilton, co-founder and current festival director of PalFest, said he believes the UKLFI’s letter “is only notable for its moral bankruptcy and proves that Israel’s apologists have nothing to say.”

Rooney, the author of Normal People and, most recently, Intermezzo, has long been an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, and in 2021 refused to sell the Hebrew translation rights of her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, to an Israeli publisher.

Roy and Kushner are also vocal critics of Israel. Upon accepting the PEN Pinter prize earlier this month, Roy used her speech to discuss Gaza, and said that she would donate her prize money to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

More than 1,000 figures from the literary and entertainment industry – including several Nobel laureates, Pulitzer prize, and Booker prize winners – have signed an open letter against “illiberal and dangerous” cultural boycotts.

The letter was released by the nonprofit body Creative Community For Peace [CCFP], which campaigns against cultural boycotts of Israel, after more than 1,000 book industry figures pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians”.

Among the signatories of the CCFP letter are Lee Child (creator of the Jack Reacher novels), Booker winner Howard Jacobson, Pulitzer winner David Mamet, Nobel winners Herta Müller and Elfriede Jelinek, historians Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore, and entertainers Gene Simmons, Ozzy Osbourne and Debra Messing.

The letter states: “We reject the calls to boycott Israeli and Jewish writers, publishers, authors, book festivals and literary agencies, along with those who support, work with, or platform them.

“We continue to be shocked and disappointed to see members of the literary community harass and ostracise their colleagues because they don’t share a one-sided narrative in response to the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

“Israel is fighting existential wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, both US, UK, and European Union-designated terrorist groups. The exclusion of anyone who doesn’t unilaterally condemn Israel is an inversion of morality and an obfuscation of reality.”

The signatories said history was “full of examples of self-righteous sects, movements and cults who have used short-lived moments of power to enforce their vision of purity, to persecute, exclude, boycott and intimidate those with whom they disagreed, who made lists of people with ‘bad’ views, who burned ‘sinful’ books (and sometimes ‘sinful’ people).”

They pointed to various incidents over the past year, including the cancellation of “planned bookstore appearances by Jewish authors” and the publication of “lists of ‘Zionist’ authors to harass” as being “directly in opposition to the liberal values most writers hold sacred. Boycotts against authors and those who work with them is [sic] illiberal and dangerous.”

They said they believed writers, books and festivals “bring people together, transcend boundaries, broaden awareness, open dialogue, and can affect positive change … Regardless of one’s views on the current conflict, boycotts of creatives and creative institutions simply create more divisiveness and foment further hatred.”

Sally Rooney, Arundhati Roy, Rachel Kushner and Percival Everett were among the authors who this week said they would not work with any institution “complicit in violating Palestinian rights”, including operating “discriminatory policies and practices” or “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide”.

They said: “We publish this letter as we face the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century”, adding that Israel had killed “at the very least 43,362” Palestinians in Gaza since last October, and that this followed “75 years of displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid”.

The signatories added that culture “has played an integral role in normalising these injustices” and that Israeli cultural institutions, “often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades”.

About the author

“At long last, we have the first biography of the great writer Ihsan Abdel Kouddous. Jonathan Smolin vividly resurrects the man and his era with a fluent and sweeping narrative, and establishes a new benchmark for literary and intellectual biographies in our field. Decisive, lucid, and meticulously researched.”

—Yoav Di-Capua, author of No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre and Decolonization

“The on-again, off-again ‘love’ affair between the hero of the Arab world and the most influential Egyptian-Arabic writer of his day. Jonathan Smolin traces an intellectual and affective relationship that molded Arab politics of the 1950s-60s and inspired works of fiction and film that shaped a generation.”

—Joel Gordon, author of Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt

“Jonathan Smolin unveils Egypt’s tumultuous sociopolitical landscape in the 1940s to 1960s, and introduces readers to one of the greatest Arab novelists and intellectuals—Ihsan Abdel Kouddous.The Politics of Melodrama is an excellent, must-read book.”

—Alaa Al Aswany, author of The Republic of False Truths

Date and Time

September 11, 2024
1:00–2:30 p.m. ET

Overview

This webinar will present a conceptual framework for investigating the impact of cultural factors on mental health within American Indian communities. It will also present emerging findings from community-engaged research in this field. The framework hypothesizes how factors of engagement in traditional culture can protect against negative mental health outcomes. To study these factors, researchers apply multi-modal neuroscience techniques, especially electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs).

A critical component of this work is substantial engagement with community partners to inform research at each stage of the process. The presentation features community partners who are currently collaborating on mental health and neuroscience projects. Their dialogue will provide attendees with a community-centered perspective on mental health research, emphasizing the importance of integrating community input, knowledge, and experiences into the scientific discourse. The presentation will feature research from Evan White, Ph.D., that highlights the interplay between cultural practices and mental health within a neuroscience framework.

About the Office for Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity Webinar Series

The Office for Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity Webinar Series is designed for investigators conducting or interested in conducting research on mental health disparities, women’s mental health, minority mental health, and rural mental health.

Registration

This webinar is free, but registration is required .

Sponsored by

National Institute of Mental Health, Office for Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity

Contact

For questions, please contact Dawn Morales, Ph.D.

More information