The Saltbush Review is a digital literary journal founded in 2021. Based on Kaurna land in South Australia, the journal is affiliated with the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.
Mission Statement
The Saltbush Review takes inspiration from its namesake, the saltbush plant, a native shrub which flourishes in Australia’s arid, salty soil and around the country’s coastal landscapes. The journal seeks to celebrate the local space of South Australia, from which it has grown, while also fostering interconnectedness with the country’s creative and literary communities. Like the grey saltbush which blooms by the coast, the journal embraces the liminal, the marginal, and the fluid. Looking out beyond the littoral zone, the journal seeks to opens its connections across the oceans to other parts of the world.
A space for new literary work by both emerging and established writers, The Saltbush Review is open to all voices from around the globe. We love works that convey diverse relationships to place and identity and that are not afraid to experiment with boundaries. We acknowledge the challenges that all writers face, especially writers from marginalised communities, and we encourage writers from all backgrounds to submit work.
Managing Editors and Co-Founders
Lyn Dickens is an award-winning writer, editor, and academic of Singaporean Peranakan and Anglo-Celtic Australian ancestry living on unceded Kaurna land. She is the winner of a 2022 Editorial Mentorship with Liminal x Writers SA, working to produce an anthology of Asian Australian writing in South Australia. Her writing has been published in Australia, the UK, and the USA, appearing in journals such as Kill Your Darlings, Liminal (forthcoming), Meniscus, and Litbreak. Lyn’s novel-in-progress has been awarded a 2021 Write It Fellowship with Penguin Random House (PRH). Her writing has been shortlisted and longlisted for a variety of awards including the Deborah Cass Prize, the Lucy Cavendish Prize and the Richell Prize, and she was highly commended for the Chapter One Prize. Lyn has been awarded an Asialink Arts residency in India and she has a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Sydney which included a year of research at the University of Cambridge based at Emmanuel College. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and a member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.
Gemma Parker is a poet, freelance editor and teacher of ESL. She has a Graduate Diploma in Teaching and Learning and First Class Honours in Politics and has taught at schools and universities in Australia, Vietnam and Japan. As a freelance editor Gemma specialises in editing work by speakers of languages other than English. Gemma was the winner of the Shoalhaven Literary Award for Poetry (2016), was longlisted for the Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Prize for Poetry (2017) and shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize (2021). Her poems and nonfiction essays have been published in a variety of journals in Australia and overseas, including Social Alternatives, Mascara Literary Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Transnational Literature, Writ Poetry Review, Award Winning Australian Writing and Typishly. Gemma is currently enrolled in a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide where she is a student member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. She is based on Kaurna Country in Adelaide, South Australia.
Editorial Team
Clare Charlesworth is a PhD student at the University of Adelaide. Her project explores the changes made to works written by Walt Whitman, Henry James, and Willa Cather after initial publication. Clare graduated from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, with a degree in English with Creative Writing in 2019. Shortly after, Clare decided to move to Adelaide, where she now finds herself oscillating between wanting to soak up the generous sunshine and missing the rain.
Theodora Galanis is a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide, working on unceded Kaurna country. Her prize-winning Honours thesis explored postcolonial, ecocritical, and postcritical reading practices in the travel writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Her current project aims to subvert and re-hydrate the settler-colonial figure of ‘Australia’s inland sea’ to explore the complexities of national identity and environmental catastrophe. This project forms part of the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative, Between Indian and Pacific Oceans: Reframing Australian Literature, led by chief investigators Meg Samuelson and Mandy Treagus.
Mélanie Maillot is originally from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. She has taught French as a foreign language and francophone literature since 2016. She is passionate about bringing new artistic projects to life.