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.

In this guest post, Stephen Orr introduces us to Wilf Healy, hero (of sorts) of his forthcoming novel, Shining Like the Sun (March 2024).

Read on below to discover how getting lost on an overseas holiday allowed Wilf to emerge into the world and onto the page.

We’re pleased to announce the winner of the October/ November WWWC: Djuna Hallsworth! Responding to the prompt ‘on your bike’, Djuna’s story, ‘Nail Polish’, is a tale of womanhood, family, and how the ripples of trauma affect a group.

Read her winning entry in full below.