By Jason Steger
Up, up and away
It’s taken a while but Terri-ann White, former director of UWA Publishing, has disclosed that she is setting up her own publishing outfit, Upswell. She left UWAP after the University of WA announced in November last year that it was going to close its publishing arm. That didn’t happen in the end, and White stayed until the middle of June to help sort out its new iteration. She wasn’t best pleased about the way the press was treated – “dickheads”, was how she bluntly assessed the people who made the decisions – nor how she was treated after 25 years with the university. But she was wrily amused at the irony that the people behind it all lost their jobs as well – they finished at the end of last week.
Terri-ann White published Josephine Wilson's Miles Franklin-winning Extinctions and wants to publish her again.Credit: James Brickwood
White hasn’t sat around feeling sorry for herself. A week after leaving UWAP she started writing a book about the WA Museum – “it’s been going for 130 years and has never had a book about it” – and completed 85,000 words by the beginning of October. “It was the very best thing for staying away from bitterness about what happened to me.” She is also project managing the production for the museum, which should be a breeze given her experience.
Upswell titles will be distributed through Black Inc. via its deal with Penguin Random House and they will reflect White’s interest in books with distinctive voices. She says she wants to publish books that for some reason can't find an easy route to publication – “books that are too quiet, or the authors are older than 25, that are not about misery, that are not about trends”. She wants books that speak to each other across a set of intellectual interests, and how they work language and revere it. “I want to publish [Miles Franklin winner] Jacqueline Wilson and John Hughes again.”
Her first offering, which will appear in August, is Imaginative Possession: Learning to Live in the Antipodes by Belinda Probert, which White says emerged during Melbourne’s second lockdown when Probert was confined to her home. “She realised she could finally write it and deliver it. It’s a terrific book about landscape and trying to understand this place. She has a distinctive voice and it is very engaging and she takes other texts by people such as Tom Griffiths, Billy Griffiths and Bill Gammage along with her. It’s a quest for understanding.”
In September will come Upswell’s first novel, by an American writer whose book was a critical success in the US but whose foreign rights deals have frankly been a disaster. White, who has known the author for several years, described it as “a quiet literary book”. White is, though, having a bit of a break before embarking on the manuscripts – she has been “inundated”.
Credit: Andrew Dyson
Are you having a laugh?
You need a bit of a laugh after the year we’ve had. And if you’re in Sydney you really need one now. So it’s timely for the State Library of NSW to boost humorous writing by adding a prize for books pitched at a readership aged between five and 12 to its $10,000 Russell Prize for Humour Writing. The new prize will give $5000 to its inaugural winner. Previous winners of the biennial original Russell Prize are The Hunter and Other Stories of Men by David Cohen (2019) and Quicksand by Steve Toltz (2017).
The State Librarian, John Vallance, stressed the importance of humorous writing: “Someone far wiser than I once noticed that if you can’t laugh, you can’t be serious.” Works published in the past two calendar years are eligible and entries close on February 8. The winners will have a laugh when they find out who they are on June 21. https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about-library/awards
Splash the cash
The headline grant announcement in last month’s funding round from the Australia Council was the $100,000 that went to the rescue of Writing NSW, which had been thrown into an existential crisis when its application for triennial funding from the state government was knocked back. The Centre for Stories in WA received nearly $84,000 for a two-year program to support and develop culturally and linguistically diverse writers in that state, with all the money to go towards paying the writers. Writing WA also got a grant from the council, as did Westerly magazine. Gail Jones received one of the $80,000 council fellowships, and other writers who received varying amounts of funding included Alice Bishop, Chris Womersley, Danielle Wood, Davina Bell, Emily Maguire, Gregory Day, Kylie Maslen and Sonia Orchard.