Since its founding, the guiding vision of the SRB has been to foster a literary-critical culture that reflects on the breadth of writing being produced in Australia with intelligence and honesty.
For the past decade, the SRB has provided a forum for serious discussion of what Australian readers and, increasingly, international audiences value in our literary culture. Through the publication of longform reviews and essays, it has given writers from all cultural and institutional backgrounds paid opportunities to refine and attend to criticism as an art in its own right. By paying industry best-practice rates and creating pathway opportunities, the SRB has supported the careers of practising critics, who, often precariously employed in the academy or the mainstream press, are some of the most structurally disadvantaged workers in the arts and cultural sectors.
But the SRB has always understood criticism to be more than just the individual practice of judging a book to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (a practice inseparable from the commercial aims of consumer advice). Rather, it is part of the SRB’s mission to promote a more expansive understanding of criticism as a collaborative and community-centred enterprise. Criticism is not a guild practice, the sole preserve of professional book reviewers. As important as the reviews and essays themselves are the conversations they provoke. In a digital age where disagreement has become increasingly rancorous and absolute, the richness of dissenting opinion, characteristic of a thriving literary culture, provides a model for the kind of generative debate by which a society comes to know and shape itself.
We want readers of the SRB to have conversations that are edifying, to enlarge their sense of what is possible in the literary arts, and to encourage participation. With its strong ties to both the scholarly study of literature and the communities of Western Sydney, the SRB aims to bring the intensity, rigour, and joy of critical engagement out of the seminar room and into the public sphere. We believe that participation in literary-critical culture is a form of peer-driven teaching and learning that ought to be freely available to any reader. Our publishing program is thus a vital component of the social mission of both the WSRC and WSU.
Editor: James Jiang
James Jiang is a writer, editor, and recovering academic who lives and works on the lands of the Dharug people. Prior to joining the Sydney Review of Books, he was Assistant Editor at Griffith Review and Australian Book Review. He received his PhD in modernist literature from the University of Cambridge, and taught in the English and Theatre Studies program at the University of Melbourne for a number of years. His essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and generalist publications in Australia and abroad.
Coordinator: Melinda Jewell
Melinda Jewell holds a PhD in Australian literature and has worked for a decade in the WSRC as the postgraduate advisor. She has also worked as a thesis editor and as a research assistant on a number of WSRC projects, including one on world literature and another on the benefits of people living in retirement homes participating in creative writing workshops. In her spare time, she loves reading fiction of any kind and gardening.
Associate Editor: Huyen Hac Helen Tran
Huyen Hac Helen Tran is a Vietnamese-Australian writer working on Wangal land. Her work can be found in Sydney Review of Books, SBS Voices, The Suburban Review, The Big Issue, Peril Magazine, The Wayward Sky Anthology (2021), and more.
Contributing Editors: James Ley and Catriona Menzies-Pike
James Ley was the founding editor of the Sydney Review of Books. He is Deputy Editor, Books and Ideas at The Conversation.
Catriona Menzies-Pike is a writer, editor and critic who lives in Vancouver, Canada. She edited the Sydney Review of Books between 2015 and 2023.
Contributing NZ-Aotearoa Editors: Tina Maketerei and Ingrid Horrocks
A Sydney Review of Books Advisory Board was convened in January 2019 with a brief to provide strategic advice to guide the growth, governance and development of the organisation. The Board does not provide editorial oversight.
Graham Akhurst is an Aboriginal writer and academic from the Kokomini of Northern Queensland. He is a Senior Lecturer of Australian Indigenous Studies and Creative Writing and the Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges at UTS. He is the author of Borderland published by UWAP (2023).
Prof. Azadeh Dastyari is the Director of Research and Policy at the Whitlam Institute and a Professor of Human Rights Law at Western Sydney University. Her work focuses on protecting civil and political rights and challenging systemic inequality. She is passionate about amplifying voices that have been silenced or marginalised by law and policy, and removing barriers to opportunity.
A/Prof. Ben Etherington’s research and teaching centres on literature and decolonisation. He’s currently working on a historical poetics of verse in Anglophone Caribbean creole languages in the period between the abolition of slavery and political independence, a project that is supported by three-year ARC funding. It also involves collaborating with the Sydney-based Jamaican novelist Sienna Brown and UTS Impact Studio’s History Lab on a series of documentary podcasts on the history of Caribbean people in Australia. The first in the series, Caribbean Convicts in Australia, was broadcast by ABC Radio National in 2021. Ben previously worked with Alexis Wright to produce Nothing but the Truth for Radio National’s Awaye! program on the life of the Gangalidda leader, Clarence Walden. His first large research project considered primitivism within a materialist and global purview. It led to the monograph Literary Primitivism (Stanford UP, 2018). More recently, Ben has worked with Samuel Spinner on special issue on primitivism with Comparative Literature (forthcoming 2024). Ben has recently held fellowships at the Heyman Center at Columbia University, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Birmingham, and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. He also writes occasional essays on Australian literary criticism and higher education for the Sydney Review of Books and other venues.
A/Prof. Kate Fagan (Chair) is the Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre. She is an internationally recognised poet, scholar and songwriter whose third collection of poetry First Light (Giramondo) was short-listed for both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Award. Her new collection Song in the Grass was published by Giramondo in 2024. Her album Diamond Wheel won the National Film and Sound Archive Award for Folk Recording, and she is a former Editor-in-Chief of How2, the established U.S.-based journal of contemporary and modernist innovative poetry and poetics. Kate is the Project Director of The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and artsworkers from Western Sydney.
A/Prof. Anne Jamison is a feminist literary critic with a research focus on nineteenth-century Irish women's writing. She is currently Associate Professor in English in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, as well as Deputy Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre. She has published broadly on nineteenth-century Irish writing, including research on Alicia Lefanu, Kate O'Brien, Frances Browne, James Clarence Mangan and Hannah Boyd, as well as on the intersections between law, literature and authorship in the early Victorian period. She published a monograph in 2016 with Cork University Press on collaborative Irish writers Edith Somerville and Violet Martin: E. OE. Somerville and Martin Ross; Female Authorship and Literary Collaboration. Anne is currently working on a book-length project on Irish women's fantasy and fairy tale writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has recently been awarded a Keough-Naughton Library Award in Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame (USA) to support this work.
Dr Debra Keenahan is an artist, psychologist and author. She has 2 PhDs – the first in psychology on Dehumanization, the second in visual arts on Critical Disability Aesthetics. Debra has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions and sole and co-authored a book, book chapters and articles. Her work focusses upon the personal and social impacts of disability. Having achondroplasia dwarfism, Debra brings personal insight to understanding the dynamics of interpersonal interactions that include/exclude the visibly different from equitable social relations. In her art practice she employs different mediums to communicate with and engage people on difficult issues, encouraging empathy for the socially excluded.
Dolla Merrillees is the Director of Western Sydney Creative. She has held various senior roles including CEO and Director, Curatorial, Collections and Exhibitions with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences; Associate Director, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation; and Director, Visual Arts, Museums and Galleries NSW.
Sheila Ngọc Phạm is a writer, editor and radio producer working across public health, media and the arts. She writes for a wide range of literary and mainstream publications, and was a finalist for the 2021 Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. Sheila has held editorial roles at the ABC and co-produced Tongue Tied and Fluent, a five-part series for Radio National exploring multilingualism in Australia, which was awarded an ABU-UNESCO Together for Peace Media Award 2021. Sheila lives on Dharug land with her husband and two children.
Gabrielle Trainor AM is a non-executive director and advisor whose experience covers over 25 years on boards in the public and private sectors ranging from infrastructure and urban development to sports, arts and culture and Indigenous advancement and welfare. Among her many board appointments Gabrielle is Chair of the National Film and Sound Archive and Barnardos Australia and an appointed member of the Western Sydney University Board of Trustees.
The SRB is currently not accepting unsolicited contributions or pitches. For enquiries about our editorial process, please email: editor@sydneyreviewofbooks.com.
For all other enquiries, please email: enquiries@sydneyreviewofbooks.com.
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About SRB
The Sydney Review of Books (SRB) is Australia’s leading critical journal. Founded in 2013 to redress the diminishing opportunities for critics in the mainstream press, the SRB publishes longform reviews and literary essays that continue to set the bar for editorial rigour, intellectual ambition, and formal innovation. Every week we feature new work, from the most widely recognised names to emerging practitioners, with a program that reflects the diversity of literary talent across the country.
In our addition to our digital publishing, we publish print anthologies, produce podcasts, and curate a lively series of public programs in partnership with festivals, libraries, universities, and peer arts organisations across Australia.
The SRB is based in Parramatta as part of the Writing and Society Research Centre (WSRC) at Western Sydney University (WSU). You can find out more about our team and our Advisory Board below.