The future of Southerly

As many of you know, Southerly is Australia’s oldest literary journal and has just published its 80th birthday issue. It is a landmark issue that includes extraordinary new works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and reviews.

Unfortunately, the future of Southerly is uncertain. Southerly has not received funding from State or Federal governments for two years. It has survived on two lots of funding from the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales and one from the School of Arts and Letters, University of Sydney, for which we are very grateful. We will continue to try and secure Arts funding but, like other journals in this situation, most of the editorial time of the last two years has  been spent on securing funding – and mostly failing to do so.

The current situation is not sustainable and Southerly is seeking alternatives in a bid to survive. At this time the board is considering a range of options re funding and is striving to find ways to continue. To date, we have received financial commitments for 2020 from the School of Arts and Media at UNSW at the School of Arts and Letter at the University of Sydney but it is not enough to run an annual program. As you will also know, university budgets are highly constrained for 2020.

Southerly is seeking funds to enable it to continue publishing in 2020. We stress that Southerly editors are themselves not paid. All money goes to writers, to the production and distribution of the issues and a small amount to administration. We also seek ideas from our wide national and international readership re securing Southerly’s future. Please contact us through the Southerly email: Southerlyjournal@groups.unsw.edu.au

We have set up a crowdfunding platform so you can personally support Australia’s oldest literary journal.