In 2022, we celebrate forty years of the UTS Writers’ Anthology, with this special edition of the series. Showcasing short fiction, poetry, personal essay and non-fiction, this treasury features select works from the Anthology’s previous thirty-five issues, all produced by students of the UTS Creative Writing program.
40: Forty years of the UTS Writers’ Anthology
This extraordinary collection features a foreword by Miles Franklin Award winner Melissa Lucashenko, and a fascinating history by Dr Delia Falconer, who has been teaching in the program for sixteen years and guided several issues of the Anthology.
Reading these stories is like opening a sequence of time capsules, from which the compressed atmosphere of a time and place bursts back out.
Delia Falconer
The UTS Writers’ Anthology is the result of dedicated and painstaking contributions from student writers, editors, writing staff, the Anthology Committee and our publishing and other industry partners. It continues to be one of the most exciting public displays of the outstanding student works that emerge from FASS’s world class writing program. Every year I look forward to the publication of each new edition and I am immensely proud to be here to witness the celebration of its 40 year history.
Professor Alan Davison, Dean of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
For forty years the UTS Writers' Anthology has showcased the extraordinary range of talent of the students in the UTS Creative Writing program. Its contribution to the emergence of new voices in Australian writing is incalculable.
Anthony Macris
Of the many anthologies coming out of university writing programs, the annual UTS collection has always been the standout.
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Contributors
Contributors to this special edition of the Anthology are drawn from its four-decade-long history and include: Zoe Adler Bishop, David Astle, Karen Attard, Kerry Bashford, Verity Borthwick, Emily Brugman, Bernard Cohen, Eliza Compton, Gillian Coote, MTC Cronin, Toby Fitch, Emma Froggatt, Zahid Gamieldien, Alison Gibbs, Erica Harrison, Adam Jeffrey, Chris Jones, Natalie Kershaw, sydney khoo, Isabelle Li, Debbie Lim, Tom Lodewyke, Damien Lovelock, Gillian Mears, Lily Mei Murray, Chloe Michele, Patti Miller, Judi Morison, Kay Nankervis, Uncle Norm Newlin, Aden Rolfe, Mark Rossiter, Joseph Schwarzkopf, Nicky Shortridge, Pat Skinner, Rebecca Slater, David Snell, Jo Truman, Sam Twyford-Moore, Conrad Walters, Rachel Ward, Harry Webber, Karen Weiss, Jessica White, Alison Whittaker, J.S Woerner, Beth Yahp and Sally Zwartz.
40: Forty years of the UTS Writers’ Anthology, is published by Brio Books. The Editorial Committee consisted of Zohra Aly, Reilly Keir, Charle Malycon, Callan McNeilage, Cecilia Ritchie and Clare Shiu who curated the final selection of creative works from over 1000 pieces. The publishers and Editorial Committee have worked tirelessly on the production, design, editing and promotion of the anthology throughout the year and are thrilled to reprise this fascinating selection of writing from the UTS Creative Writing Program. They are especially grateful to all the authors who agreed to having their work reprinted—in many cases, their earliest published pieces of writing.
The Committee would like to thank Melissa Lucashenko for her beautifully considered foreword; David Henley, Alice Grundy, and all the team at Brio Books who completely transformed the Anthology when they came onboard in 2012 and have continued to do so ever since; Dr Delia Falconer, Associate Professor Debra Adelaide, David Henley and especially, UTS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Business Development Manager, James Lew, for making this anniversary edition a reality; UTS staff, Jacqueline Robson, Julie McAlonana and Nick Evans for their support; and all those who have helped us track down writers and secure permission to reprint, in particular—Bruce Carter and Nick Henderson of the Australian Queer Archives, Gaby Naher (Left Bank Literary), Felicity Plunkett, Dr Katrina Thorpe, Kent Steedman, Michael Abrahams-Sprod and Sue-Ann Stanford.
Featured contributors
Patti Miller’s story, ‘Pink Cakes’ is the titular work of the very first UTS Writers’ Anthology (1982) which appears alongside another of her stories, ‘Messages.’ Since studying at UTS, Miller has gone on to carve a successful writing life. She is the author of nine books including Australia’s best-selling life-writing texts, Writing Your Life, The Memoir Book and Writing True Stories (A&U) as well as a novel, Child (A&U) and five memoir/narrative non-fiction books: The Last One Who Remembers (A&U), Whatever The Gods Do (Random House), The Mind of a Thief (UQP)—winner of the 2013 NSW Premier’s Prize for History, Ransacking Paris (UQP) and most recently, The Joy of High Places (NewSouth).
Since his poem ‘Sepulcar’ was published in 1984’s Live from the War Zone, David Astle has been contorting words into cryptic puzzles and arranging them into two novels, several short plays and a stream of wordplay titles including Puzzled, Cluetopia, Riddleton and Rewording the Brain. Away from manuscripts, Astle has been dictionary umpire on the SBS gameshow Letters and Numbers and the regular language sleuth on ABC’s News Breakfast. ‘Wordplay’, Astle’s weekly plunge into English, appears in ‘Spectrum’ in the Sydney Morning Herald. Since 2019, he’s been the Evenings host on ABC Radio Melbourne.
Beth Yahp was both editor and author in the 1987 UTS Writers’ Anthology: 13 New Beginnings. Originally from Malaysia, Yahp is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction, whose work has been published in Australia and internationally. Her novel, The Crocodile Fury (Angus & Robertson 1992) was translated into several languages and her libretto, Moon Spirit Feasting, for composer Liza Lim, won the APRA Award for Best Classical Composition in 2003. Her latest publication is a collection of short stories, The Red Pearl and Other Stories (Vagabond Press 2017). Her travel memoir, Eat First, Talk Later (Penguin Random House 2015) was shortlisted for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (Non-Fiction). Dr Yahp is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.
Chris Jones was a poet, artist and editor, and a vocal Sydney activist for gay rights and injecting drug users. During the ’70s and ’80s both his writing and art generated some of the community’s most recognisable statements, including the poster for the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, 1978. In 1992 his verse novel, The Times of Zenia Gold, received high praise from Dorothy Porter who described it as ‘full-frontal gay ghetto poetry’. Under Jones’ editorship, the NSW Users and AIDS Association newsletter evolved into the widely circulated magazine, NUAA News (later User’s News). In later years Jones relocated to Narrabri, then Soldiers Point. He passed away in 2013. His legacy continues.
Gillian Mears’ student writing was published in the 1987 UTS Writers’ Anthology. She wrote its foreword in 1991 and was later featured in the retrospective Thirteenth Floor (2000). After graduating from UTS, professional acclaim swiftly followed; her short story collections and novels winning major prizes. Mears’ first novel, The Mint Lawn (1991), won the 1990 The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award. Her third novel, Foal’s Bread, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2011. It won The Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, The Age Book of the Year for Fiction and the ALS Gold Medal, all awarded in 2012. It was shortlisted for The Indie Awards (2012), the Barbara Jefferis Award (2012), the Miles Franklin Literary Award (2012) and the ABIA Book of the Year (2012). Mears also published a children’s story, The Cat With the Coloured Tail (Walker Books Australia) and Paradise is a Place, a photo essay created in collaboration with Sydney photographer Sandy Edwards. She died at home in Grafton on 16 May 2016. She is sorely missed and remembered with loving gratitude.
During the three years that Toby Fitch was an undergraduate writer at UTS (2003–2005) his work was selected for every Anthology. ‘post’ was Fitch’s first piece, already showing evidence of his poetic interests. He published another short story in 2004 and a poem in 2005. In that year’s biography he swore that ‘now he’d finished studying he [would] probably go away again, eloping with words and never coming back.’ Academia hasn’t quite relinquished Fitch, however. He is now a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney (where he completed his Doctor of Arts), the poetry editor of Overland, editor of several poetry anthologies, and the director of AVANT GAGA and the Poetry Night at Sappho Books. He is the author of seven books of poetry, including Where Only the Sky had Hung Before and, most recently, Sydney Spleen (Giramondo 2021).
Alison Whittaker’s poem, ‘Two Curled Backs Two Bookends’ was published in the 2016 Anthology and she wrote the Foreword in 2019. A multi-tasking Gomeroi poet, essayist and legal academic, Whittaker is an essential voice in the literary world. She is currently a Senior Researcher at the Jumbunna Institute. Whittaker’s debut poetry collection Lemons in the Chicken Wire was awarded the State Library of Queensland’s black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship in 2015. Her second book Blakwork was shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. In 2020, she was the editor of the anthology Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today. Whittaker was also the co-winner of the 2017 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for ‘Many Girls White Linen’. She was the Indigenous Poet-in-Residence for the 2018 Queensland Poetry Festival. In 2017–2018, Whittaker was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard Law School, where she was named the Dean’s Scholar in Race, Gender and Criminal Law.
sydney khoo is a non-binary and queer writer, born in Australia to Malaysian-Chinese parents. Though typically drinking bubble tea in Cabramatta or reading fanfiction in a McDonald’s carpark, they can occasionally be found writing nonsense stories at cafés with their dog Gizmo. In addition to ‘I’m (Not) Lovin’ It’, khoo’s short works, ‘Collecting Stormwater for the Withering Drought’ and ‘肉骨茶 [Bak Kut Teh]’, were featured in the 2018 and 2019 UTS Writers’ Anthologies: Light Borrowers and Infinite Threads (respectively). khoo is the recipient of the 2019 Penguin Random House Fellowship and is working on their first YA novel The Spider and Her Demons. Their work can also be found in SWAMP magazine (2019), F(r)iction magazine (2020) and Aniko Press (2021).
Order your copy of 40: Forty years of the UTS Writers’ Anthology