Australian publishing

While the Australian book market was down 3% last year, genre fiction - popular on BookTok - was among the rare categories that grew.

Since 2020, BookTok has been increasingly influential in how people (especially young people) read. Books popular on BookTok were among the top ten bestselling Australian titles of 2024.

Writing and publishing a book about a controversial public figure is like diving into shark-infested waters, says ABC investigative journalist Louise Milligan. She told her Adelaide Writers' Week audience that if she'd written her 2017 award-winning book Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Cardinal Pell today, she wondered if it would even be published.  Read more

The winner of Australia's richest literary prize did not attend the ceremony.

His absence was not by choice.

Behrouz Boochani, whose debut book won both the $25,000 non-fiction prize at the Victorian premier's literary awards and the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature on Thursday night, is not allowed into Australia.

What a difference a decade or so makes.  Read more

The internet and e-books were meant to signal the death of the physical book. That didn't happen. The plight of authors is another matter. As they face a perfect storm of relentless commercial pressures and repeated attacks by the federal government, the outlook for authors and their readers, and for Australia's literary culture, has never been bleaker.