Read a selection of pieces

Meanjin acknowledges the passing of Hilary McPhee, who began her brilliant career in writing and publishing as this journal’s editorial assistant and guest-edited the Winter 2015 edition of Meanjin, an undertaking she described as ‘a surprising pleasure.’ Her own writing ...

Thanks for travelling through the highways and byways of this Reading Trails series. Here’s hoping it’s opened many doors to Meanjin’s archive – introducing you to new writing friends and reading companions along the way, as well as re-uniting you ...

Roughly 10% of an iceberg sits above the waterline, meaning the other 90% goes unseen (at least to us surface-dwellers). Literary translation is not unlike an iceberg: only a small part of the labour involved is visible in the finished ...

We’re approaching the last week of voting in this year’s ABC-RN Top 100 poll of Australian books. This week’s reading trail celebrates Brian Castro, author of twelve novels as well as non-fiction and poetry – and one of Australia’s most ...

Join this week’s trail for a journey into the power and purpose of literature with award-winning Waanyi novelist and writer Alexis Wright. Based on her 2018 Bousbouvier Lecture (The Power and Purpose of Literature), Wright uses this glorious essay to ...

‘My work is situated deep inside my nervous system, and I see the world “feelingly”. Floating around in a metaphorical forest of symbols searching for the pathos in things, I am a leaf in the wind, a daydreamer.’ – Heather ...

This week’s Reading Trail – to spark or complement your thinking and list-making for votes in ABC-RN’s Top 100 Australian Books poll, or simply to whet your reading appetite – begins with “When We Talk About Time”, a lyrical and ...

This week’s reading trail travels with award-winning Indigenous author, academic and activist Tony Birch as he describes writing his 2015 novel Ghost River, awarded the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, shortlisted for categories in that year’s NSW ...

Cultural mediation connects audiences to artwork through conversation that meets visitors where they are. It works to communicate an artist’s intent in a way that builds on the viewer’s own understandings and experiences, without mediators dominating any of these exchange ...

Head to the Pilliga Scrub this week with two extraordinary observers of Australia, its landscapes, histories and potential futures. Originally published in 2016, “Changescapes” travels with Ross Gibson as Gibson travels with Eric Rolls in the quest to “graft” Rolls’ ...

Mounted into sockets in my skull are two prime lenses. They are 35mm, a focal length that mimics the field of view of the human eye, according to photographers. What my prime lenses see is recorded on a memory card ...

This week’s Reading Trail in support of ABC-RN’s imminent Top 100 Australian Books poll revisits Helen Garner’s appreciation of the work of Elizabeth Jolley . In this overview, published in the winter of 1983, Garner celebrates Jolley’s humour, her pathos, ...

This week’s ABC Radio National Top-100-adjacent trail heads down the Booker pathway. As you contemplate the 2026 Booker-Prize longlist (and imagine the judging conversations that must be happening amongst that fantasy-dinner-party panel of Mary Beard, Jarvis Cocker, Patricia Lockwood, Rebecca ...

In October 1973, Australian novelist Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This week’s reading trail heads back to 1957, when White published an extract from Voss, his fifth novel, in Meanjin, volume 16, no. 3. This book, ...

Since 2016, Meanjin has published an occasional series called “Australia in Three Books”, which invites contributors to nominate three titles that speak to an idea of Australia for them – what it was, what it is, what it could be, ...