Peter Rose Editorial Cadetship

As reported in July Advances, ABR received wonderful support from Patrons and supporters for the Peter Rose Editorial Cadetship, and we thank them all most sincerely for their expression of support for Australian cultural life and publishing.

The twelve-month placement will offer an aspiring editor training and experience at Australia’s leading literary publication. We know that there ever fewer opportunities for those hoping to enter the publishing industry. One of the benefits of a small team is that editors work across a range of tasks and so are equipped to enter a diverse range of publishing roles.

ABR received seventy-six applications. Reading those applications, Advances was struck by the talent and enthusiasm, as well as by the knowledge and understanding of ABR’s unique role in Australia’s publishing landscape. Thank you to all who applied. We look forward to introducing readers to the Peter Rose Editorial Cadet on our website shortly and in October Advances.  

The 2025 Miles Franklin Award

Shortly after ABR went to print last month it was announced that Siang Lu had won the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel, Ghost Cities. Judges Richard Neville, Jumana Bayeh, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, and Hsu-Ming Teo said:

In Ghost Cities, the Sino-Australian imaginary appears as a labyrinthine film-set, where it is never quite clear who is performing and who is directing. Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.

In her review in the May 2024 issue, Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen described Ghost Cities as ‘an impressive piece of work that blends genre tropes, storytelling techniques, and observations of the modern world to cement Lu as an assured voice in experimental Australian fiction.’ Congratulations from ABR, Siang Lu.

What impedes your writing, Elizabeth Harrower?

This issue includes a review by Ramona Koval of two biographies of novelist Elizabeth Harrower (1928-2020), published within weeks of one another. For biographers, a central question is why Harrower ceased, or slowed, writing after producing four novels in the late 1950s and the 1960s. It was a ‘mid-life fallow period’, writes Koval, and some found her guilty of the double crime of ‘not continuing her writing and dying old’.

In the November 2015 issue, Harrower featured as an Open Page subject. When asked ‘What if anything impedes your writing?’, a question we continue to put to writers, Harrower responded: ‘At different times different forces, sometimes not even a world war.’ As to what she was working on then, another wonderfully enigmatic answer: ‘The engine is idling, ready to go.’