Murdoch Stephens

Aug 18, 2024 | overland.org.au | Murdoch Stephens |Savannah Hollis |Emmett Stinson

As the founding editor of Lawrence & Gibson publishing collective, I’ve bound about 14000 books in my life. Our collective hand makes books in a little office in central Wellington. We’re nineteen years in and have thirty-two titles to our credit. When I say I hand-make books, people immediately think of industrial revolution-era machines with stitched bindings and offset plates. Not so! Nor are we the new school of fully automated print on demand.

Jun 2, 2024 | overland.org.au | Alan Fyfe |Scott-Patrick Mitchell |Murdoch Stephens |Lucy Sussex

Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s Clean (Upswell 2022) and Alan Fyfe’s T (Transit Lounge 2022) are books with a deep relation. A poetry collection and a novel respectively, Clean and T were released within less than a year of each other and attracted multiple award listings; and both deal with methamphetamine use in Western Australia, a state which consumes the drug at almost twice the national average. The authors share a longstanding friendship.

Jul 2, 2023 | overland.org.au | Scott Robinson |Murdoch Stephens |Samantha Trayhurn

In the near constant debate about housing affordability, it can be hard to distinguish empty policy chatter from genuine proposals based in well-grounded analysis. This is, in part, because property developers and businesses, along with parts of the media, run a concerted campaign to urge governments to fix the housing crisis with ‘supply-side’ solutions.

Jun 18, 2023 | overland.org.au | Fiannuala Morgan |Jeff Sparrow |Murdoch Stephens

In recent years, the scholarship of Bruce Pascoe (bolstered and supplemented by environmental historians such as Bill Gammage) has arguably shifted mainstream Australia’s understanding of Indigenous culture from nomadic to agricultural, and the disaster of Black Summer has further moved settler Australia towards an appreciation of Indigenous cultural practices as an amelioration of ecological disaster and climate change (Pascoe 2018; Gammage and Pascoe 2021; Gammage 2011).

Jun 6, 2023 | overland.org.au | Murdoch Stephens |Lucy Sussex |Samantha Trayhurn

Rats are to 2023 as teen vampires were to 2008. We’ve got good rats, like Magawa the mine sniffing rat. There’s a rat czar who, unfortunately, is not a rat. And we’ve even got a rat ambassador (who is a rat) who is a legitimate chonker. We love them all. They’re just part of the wonderful cultural tableau that has settled on the rat as the hero we need. In Aotearoa New Zealand we’ve also got the Rat King Landlord which is a novel about a rat who becomes a landlord.