Early last year I was the fortunate recipient of the tenth Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship, an award that gives a senior editor in Australia the chance to go to the United States to learn more about their craft and the publishing industry. I spent three months in New York examining the relationship between authors and their editors/publishers and literary agents.

My focus was on literary fiction and one of the starting points for my research was the assumption that the relationship between an author and their editor/publisher is a close one. Many editors go to great lengths to look after writers they work with. Beatrice Davis, the most famous of Australian editors past, who worked with the likes of Ruth Park and Miles Franklin, was renowned for her very personal relationships with those she edited. Jacqueline Kent, in her biography of Davis, A Certain Style, paints the picture of an editor who had authors around to her house for soirées.