Wakefield Press is delighted to announce the acquisition of ANZ rights to Katharine Pollock’s comedic second novel, provisionally titled Starry Eyed, via Benython Oldfield of Zeitgeist Agency. Publication is projected in March 2025.

Read on to find out more about this exciting new acquisition.

We’re pleased to announce the winner of the April WWWC: Dante DeBono. Responding to the prompt ‘there is joy in things’, Dante’s winning piece, ‘Object Permanence’, is a bittersweet tale of grief and memory, and the healing nature of time.

Read the winning piece in full below.

Gillian Dooley’s Matthew Flinders: The man behind the map is an exploration of Flinders the man, rather than the decorated navigator and leader, idolised by generations of admirers. In this lovely guest post, Gillian retraces Matthew Flinders through Mauritius, giving advice to documentary producers, surviving a cyclone, giving talks on Flinders, and dealing with delayed flights.

Read her lively piece below.

We’re pleased to announce the second of two winners for the March WWWC: Robert Moore. Responding to the prompt ‘the air was moving’, Robert’s powerful yarn follows a man and his dog trying to make sense of a strange and unwelcoming world.

Read Robert’s winning piece, ‘The Cowboy Man’, below. Find fellow winner Megan Sougleris’s piece here.

We’re pleased to announce the first of two winners for the March WWWC: Megan Sougleris. Responding to the prompt ‘the air was moving’, Megan’s artistic tale paints a story of familial love, grief, and learning that some things will always be unknowable.

Read Megan’s winning piece, ‘Tempera’, below. Find fellow winner Robert Moore’s piece here.

A new university president with a dubious past. Military parades. Inter-office romance. Marketing acrobatics. Corporate scandals and corruption. All of this and more leaps off the page in Les Kilmartin’s rollicking satire Open Day, which burst onto shelves late last year.

In this special guest post, Les gives us a sneak peek into the inspiration for the novel: the inner workings of modern universities and the eccentric characters that keep these corporate machines in motion.

Read Les’s piece in full below.

Margi Prideaux’s urgent and excellent Fire: A message from the edge of climate catastrophe, was written in the wake of devastation. In the Black Summer of 2019–20, Kangaroo Island was one of many communities ravaged by unprecedented bushfires. Now, Margi advocates for communities and nature impacted by climate catastrophe.

In this guest post, Margi writes about the potentially grim future we face in coming years if current climate inaction continues.

Read her piece in full below.

We’re pleased to announce the winner of the January WWWC: Margaret Crohn. Responding to the prompt ‘time and again’ Margaret’s epistolary ‘Welcome to Our Town’ chronicles one side of an explosive disagreement.

Read her winning entry in full below.

It’s a stressful world and we can become overwhelmed. But at what point does sadness become depression, and stress an anxiety disorder? In Default Depression, author Anthony Smith examines the medicalisation of common human experience. 

Default Depression builds a compelling case for an extensive shift in how we support people in psychological and emotional distress – away from the damaging tendency to medicalise and medicate, towards a more nuanced and evidence-based approach.

In this guest piece, Anthony writes about the Situational Approach, which reconceptualises human distress as a response to a difficult situation, rather than as an illness.

Read his piece in full below.