The rich and varied culture of Australia’s First Nations peoples is without doubt our most significant cultural asset. The visual art of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists was perhaps the first art form to get serious international attention, but more recently First Nations dance, theatre, music, and writing are being recognized for the unique perspectives they bring not only to our difficult history, but to current social and environmental issues.
In literature, Australian First Nations writers such as Tara June Winch, Melissa Lucashenko, Kim Scott, and Alexis Wright have been published internationally to deserved acclaim. Poet Ali Cobby Eckermann won the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize in 2017. Since then, there has been a new wave of young Australian First Nations poets gaining attention. Last year, Evelyn Araluen won the Stella Prize with Dropbear, the first book of poetry to win the award for writing by Australian women.
Measuring significance is difficult. Literary awards are one measure but not the only one, as is book sales. I think significance is when a book feels it is “of the moment,” revealing something new about our world or ourselves that was previously hidden.
Australian writers who have achieved significance internationally include great writers such as Tom Keneally, Peter Carey, and Shirley Hazzard. More recently, writers such as Jessica Au (Cold Enough for Snow), Christos Tsiolkas (The Slap, Barracuda, Damascus) and Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things, The Weekend) have done that too.
Perhaps significance is also personal. I’m referring to the books that have moved us or stayed with us. For me, Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears, One Hundred Days by Alice Pung, Scary Monsters by Michelle De Kretser, and Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko are significant books.
Describe the structure of your organization and its goal(s). How many staff members does it employ and what are their main activities?
We are the Australian government’s principal arts funding and advisory body and employ over one hundred staff. We are going through an exciting period of change. In January, the government announced its new cultural policy, Revive, which sets out an ambitious new agenda. On July 1, we changed our name from the Australia Council to Creative Australia. This change reflects the reach and impact of our broader creative industries. Another major change is that three new independent bodies will be established within Creative Australia to steward direct investment in contemporary music, First Nations arts and culture, and literature. This will happen over two years. In 2025, Writers Australia will be established within Creative Australia. Essentially, this means that Australian writing will have its own advisory body and budget—a welcome boost to Australian literature.
How much funding does your organization disburse in a year and where does the funding come from?
The budget for our organization in the financial year 2021–22 was almost 200 million AUD, of which five million went to literature. The budget comes from the Australian government and is disbursed to individuals and organizations through project and multi-year investment for small- to medium-sized organizations as well as the major performing arts companies.
Including the one awarded in 2021, as many as five Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded to writers working in English in the past decade alone. Translation into English has also been a crucial factor for many of the winners to receive consideration in the first place. In light of this linguistic hegemony, I imagine that there is an increased focus on translation into English, the costs of which can’t be met by market demand alone. Given your own institution’s limited resources, what criteria do you use to choose which authors to fund, and, given the sources of your funding, are there certain considerations factored into your selection?
Australian literature is primarily published in English. For Australian writers the main challenge is our small market and competition from bigger, better-known English language markets such the US and the UK. Australian writers don’t regularly appear in the shortlists for the Booker and the Nobel Prize and I believe this is not about their quality. There is a barrier there. It may be to do with the fact that Australian books are rarely published separately in the UK due to historical rights territories. Our only Nobel laureate for literature was Patrick White back in 1973! It was exciting to see Michelle De Kretser win the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize for fiction recently. Michelle’s book, Scary Monsters, was published by Atlantic Books in the UK.
Translation is incredibly important to Australian writers. The small Australian market means international rights sales are essential for writers to make a living. Recent research revealed that the average earnings for an author from their creative work are extremely low, at $18,200; this amount is even smaller for literary authors.
One of the initiatives we run is a fund to assist with the costs of translation of works by Australian authors into other languages. This funding is also available to Australian publishers to translate works from other languages into English, translated by Australian translators. Applicants must include a signed rights contract to demonstrate their commitment to publishing the work. The criteria we apply to assess the applications are: quality of the work, track record of the translator, and the publisher’s ability to market and promote the translated work.
A literary ecosystem not only includes writers and translators but also editors, reviewers, publishers, literary agents, and booksellers, all of whom play a role in fostering a vibrant literary scene. Bearing this in mind, how would you describe the state of the literary ecosystem in your country (e.g., is it healthy, in your opinion)? Does any part of your funding go toward supporting the wider literary infrastructure (as opposed to just writers and translators)? If there was a local equivalent of a magazine with a global focus like Asymptote, would it receive any ongoing support from your organization, for example?
The level of overall investment in literature through our organization over the past decade was very low. This has led to increased stress on smaller organizations and individual writers, so I would not describe the Australian literary ecosystem as healthy. We have multiyear and project funding streams as well as targeted investment programs such as travel, rights, and translation funds.
Writers and organizations such as literary journals, writers’ centres, independent publishers, and literary festivals are all eligible for funding through our Arts Projects for organizations rounds but the low level of available funding means many miss out. We support one writer’s fellowship per year for an established writer and fund other writers through our Arts Projects for Individuals rounds. Currently, we invest about $1.8 million per year in organizations through multiyear investment in nine organizations. We also support organizations and new initiatives through project grant rounds.
The additional investment announced in Revive will more than double the investment in the ecosystem from July 1, 2025, onwards. I couldn’t be more excited about it!
The sitcom Seinfeld was notably a flop in Germany. Similarly, authors who encounter success in one culture sometimes do not receive the same reception in another. What are some surprising crossover successes or failures you have encountered in your tenure with this institution and what do you think might have led to these outcomes?
We recently supported research into rights sales of Australian books in international markets 2008–2018.
Australian authors have had remarkable success in a number of commercial fiction genres. These include Michael Robotham and Jane Harper in crime fiction; Matthew Reilly in action/thriller; Liane Moriarty in upmarket commercial fiction. Certain genres such as outback crime or rural noir have been significant crossover successes.
Australian children’s books are also punching well above their weight internationally. During the ten-year period of the research study, over half of all recorded deals were for children’s books. 54% involved titles targeted at younger readers: picture books (21%), middle grade (27%), teen and young adult (YA) (6%). Children’s books are more likely to have universal appeal and generally are not geographically specific.
What are some recent challenges you have faced advocating for your country’s literature and how has your institution adapted to meet these challenges? Tell us about your proudest accomplishments as an institution in the past ten years. I’d be particularly interested to hear about any campaigns that your institution conceived to advocate for your country’s literature.
It has been a challenging time for writers and the entire sector. Even before COVID, writers’ incomes were precarious and they have only been impacted further by the pandemic. When I came into my current role at Creative Australia in 2017, there had just been significant budget cuts which resulted in less funding for writers and for the entire literary sector. Since then, we have been working on building the case for further investment through advocacy and research. We supported research to demonstrate the value of books and reading and the economic and cultural impact of international book sales.
In 2021, there was an inquiry into Australia’s cultural institutions that opened a path for the entire literary industry to come together to highlight the challenges. Authors themselves wrote incredible submissions to the inquiry which got the attention of the Parliamentary Committee. Our new minister for the arts, Tony Burke, has committed to a boost to literature investment, so we are feeling very positive about the future.
Authors are writing incredible books but our small market, the rise of online shopping, and competition for attention means we must do more to cultivate readers, particularly for books by writers who don’t have an established brand or a breakout success, which may be overlooked as a result. Some current challenges include a worrying trend which shows a decline in reading, particularly among young adults. Investment in a national reading promotion program, writers in schools, and more collaborations with libraries are all under consideration.
The move to online retail in Australia is also something we are watching closely. Australia is blessed with strong independent book shops and we must do everything we can to keep that.
In his Nobel Lecture, Kazuo Ishiguro exhorted us to “widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities.” Yet, in one crucial respect, this ideal of an inclusive world literature shares the same problem as the climate crisis or even the COVID-19 vaccine crisis: countries that have the means to do something about a global situation often end up looking out for their own interests. How do you think institutional advocates of a country’s literature might be better allies for world literature, if they might even play a role at all?
This is an interesting question. I think we are all aware that our books and our publishing industry is not reflective of Australia’s contemporary society. We have an incredibly diverse population with 30% of Australians born overseas and more than one fifth of whom speak a language other than English at home, yet our literary culture has yet to reflect that in the books that are published by the industry.
There are now programs which aim to open up the scene to new voices, by recruiting editors and publishers from diverse backgrounds. This is an important and overdue shift.
