Celebrate modern and independent Australian writing with the first edition of Written Off. Fifteen works by local writers and art curation by Justin Trendall, Australian artist.
Excerpt of Works
I Penitit
‘So, the history of Italian hardcore…’ Rocco began, distracted by the screenwriter sitting across from him, who placed a notepad to his right and a recording device between them.
‘You’ll edit this down, no?’…
Max Easton
is a writer from Sydney with work appearing in Mess+Noise, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and Sydney Review of Books. He is the creator of Barely Human, a zine and podcast series exploring underground music’s ties to counterculture and subculture. His first novel, The Magpie Wing, was longlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. His second novel, Paradise Estate, was published by Giramondo in October 2023.
The Gap
There is school and there is the gap. It is where angels dance.
You have to become small between the pillar and the wall. The pillar does not move no matter what you do. It seems ancient like a rock but it is square and straight and tall…
Soren Tae Smith
is a writer and early career researcher working with stories of imagination, memory and experience. Her work appears in many of the usual places. Her first book, Honey from the Ground, won the Barrow Street Press prize for a creative-non fiction manuscript in 2023 and is forthcoming in 2024.
Luscious Lila’s Lyric Book of Lovers
I have a mental playlist of all
my lovers—a mixtape of moments—
from first flush of flirtation to salt-
encrusted silk after my heartbreak…
Paris Rosemont
is an Asian-Australian poet, author of debut poetry collection Banana Girl, published by WestWords (2023). Paris’s poetry features in journals including Verge Literary Journal, FemAsia Magazine, Red Room Poetry’s ‘Admissions’, Bristol Noir (UK) and Sky Island Journal (USA). She is the winner of the Hammond House Publishing Origins Poetry Prize 2023 (UK), New England Thunderbolt Poetry Prize 2022 and shortlisted for the International Proverse Poetry Prize 2023.
Things we take and Give
It is already October, already evening, when Maria abandons the idea that he will turn up. She changes out of her favourite sari, the one her mother gave her, and puts on her nightie…
Roanna Gonsalves
is is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of short fiction, The Permanent Resident published in India and South Asia as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney. Roanna’s work-in-progress is a work of historical fiction set in India, Australia, and Scotland between 1795 and 1825 based on the true story of Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s Indian servant, George Jarvis.
Season (al Labour)s in the Abyss
An old lady croons, “Hello beautiful, aren’t you cute?”
“I try,” I reply, grinning sheepishly.
Her eyes move from the German Shepard tied just beside where I’m working, to me. She had been addressing the dog…
Benjamin Muir‘s
forthcoming novel, The McMillan Diaries (Kith Books, 2024) won the Australasian Association of Writing Programs Chapter One Prize in 2019. His work has been published via SBS Voices, The Conversation, FBI Radio, Antipodean Science Fiction, and several anthologies. “I’m a Writer, an Academic and a Trolley Boy” adapted into an SBS’s Let me tell You podcast, won Australian Arts and Culture Podcast of the Year for 2022.
Essay: ‘Visiting Dai’
While Wang Huizhi was living in Shanyin, one night there was a heavy fall of snow. Waking from sleep, he opened the panels of his room, and, ordering wine, drank to the shining whiteness about him.…
Y. B. Wang
was born and educated mostly in China. Moved to Australia in 1999. His first selected poems in Chinese, The Sacred Temple, was published in 2007. A Summer Duet (poems and conversations), also in Chinese, was published in 2018. Simon won the first prize of World Chinese Literary Contest in new poetry, organized by Taiwan’s United Daily, in 2005. He is working at two anthologies of English poems with essays on the poetics of flowing water.
The Hand that Mocked Them and the Heart that Fed
Oswald tells Cole that the new commission will set them both up for life.
“How exactly?” Cole chews a cuticle, spits it on the floor.
“You’ll be free.” He thinks about picking up the piece of skin, placing it on the worktable with all the other artefacts.…
J.S. Breukelaar
is an award-winning Australian author of dark fiction. Her collection, Collision: Stories was a Shirley Jackson award finalist, and won both the Aurealis and Ditmar award for Best Novel. She has published three other novels, and collaborated on two collections with international authors. You can find her stories in numerous magazines and anthologies including several Years Bests. Her new novella is out next year from PS Publications.
Malta
It was the day before your birthday. I should have done the maths. But the part of me that will always be unready picked up. Of course, you would not tell me where you were. And you would not tell me what I needed to hear…
Mary Rachel Brown
is the recipient of the following playwriting awards – The Lysicrates Prize, The Rodney Seaborn Award, The Max Affords Award, The Griffin Award, and The Suzie Miller Award. Her most recent works are Roseville (Canberra Youth Theatre), contributing writer for Betty Blokk Buster Reimagined (Redline) and Dead Cat Bounce (Griffin). Her most well-known play The Dapto Chaser had a national tour, cinematic release and was broadcast on ABC TV.
Susan Fish and Steven Jobs
Isaac sits at his station among others who are working to train AI, through creative writing, about ‘the nature of meaning’. He stares at the rough fabric of the flimsy partition of his cubicle for some moments. He tries to summon the urgency of the legislator Julian’s directive — write about ‘love’…
Antony Uhlmann
is the author of a novel, Saint Antony in his Desert (UWAP, 2018), and has written creatively since the late 1980s publishing stories and poetry in journals such as Southerly, Meanjin, Outrider and elsewhere, and founding and publishing the literary journal Active:Reactive with Anthony Macris in the 1990s. He is the author of four academic and an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Four Poems
she didn’t like the way you were looking because you were staring
and everything was still. she was staring at you. both were looking
and becoming with everything perfectly; lava bubbled from the…
Monique Lyle
is currently completing her first book of poetry, The Park. The collection largely deals with images from her childhood, spent growing up in Sydney suburban housing commission in the 1990’s. Recently, poems from this collection have appeared in Micheal Farrell’s Flash Cove, Plumwood Mountain Poetry Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Overland Journal and Otoliths Magazine. Monique has also recently completed a commissioned work for Cordite Poetry Review.
Dust
Every day was the same except for some slight variations. They were always late, for example, the question was how late. Once she’d signed the late note and dropped the children at school, then she had to figure out how to sneak away without having to come face to face with another human…
Jessica Chapnik Kahn
is an Argentinian-Australian writer, actor and singer-songwriter. She has appeared in plays, films and TV, worked with some of Australia’s finest musicians, as well as releasing two solo albums under the moniker Appleonia. She is the author of children’s book Lenny and the Ants and poetry collection MADRE, and co-author of the biography A Repurposed Life, which was nominated for an ABIA award for Biography Book of the Year 2021.
Cognisance
Jacquie was compressed into a tightly-furled ball. Former basketball small forward and star of 1996’s animated/live action sports comedy Space Jam Michael Jordan was dribbling her across a brightly-lit court…
Katherine Pollock
is the author of Penguin Random House’s Her Fidelity (2022) recognised in The Age ‘Books That Made Their Mark’ list in 2022. In 2021 she won the Queensland Writers Centre’s GenreCon short story competition. Her work has also been published in Fremantle Press’s Try Not to Think of a Pink Elephant print anthology, Hear Us Scream’s Crawling print anthology, The Guardian online, and elsewhere. You can find her online at @thatrecordstoregirl.
Boiler
April 20, 2060, 6:04 P.M, my mom started being weird. At that time, I was kneeling on the bed, clinging to the windowsill and peeping outside. The place mom and I lived in was a desolate factory, which was an unbearable place for outsiders to stay, even just for half an hour…
Niao Ren
is a Chinese writer living with five parrots and a cat on Dharug country. Niao previously worked as a book editor, screenwriter, and doctor in China before coming to Australia in 2019. They currently work as a delivery driver in Sydney and plan fiction during in between waiting for orders. Niao writes in a weird mode that explores humanity and society from inside of the soul.
A Trip to Goroke
I read over my notes in anticipation of meeting who some have called the greatest living writer in the English language. I was imagining his answers to my questions about his life and work, visualising the encounter I desired.…
Jack Jeweller
was long-listed in 2018 for the Australian Book Review’s Calibre Essay Prize and has published in Overland, Artlink, Runway, The Blackmail and was part of The Writing Project, a FELTspace initiative funded by the Australia Council. He is interested in language, memory, and identity, and how each is troubled by the other. In his fiction he explores how the author is only ever a temporary and fragile symptom of the operations of language.
The Voice of Gerry Adams
Even on this upside-down side of the world, it happened. He’d been at the post office, collecting a parcel. The man must have overheard him at the counter; there was something familiar about him, this man had said. The man spoke properly, the words round and smooth in his mouth, as though they were carved from stone.
Gretchen Shirm
is a Sydney-based author and critic. She is the author of three works of fiction: Having Cried Wolf, Where the Light Falls, and most recently, The Crying Room. Her short fiction has been anthologised in Meanjin, Overland, Griffith Review, and Best Australian Stories amongst other places. Her novel Out of the Woods, about the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, is forthcoming in early 2025.
Details
Release Date: 30th April 2024
76 pages, softcover
Edition Artist
Justin Trendall
is a contemporary artist based in Sydney working on Gadigal land. Since graduating from Sydney College of the Arts in the mid 90’s he has produced an extensive body of work exploring the role history and memory play in the construction of cultural identity. The Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery of NSW, Monash University and the National Gallery of Australia all hold his work in their collections.