Writers Victoria has been defunded – but writers’ centres are ‘fundamental’ to literary culture
- Written by: Angela Glindemann, PhD Candidate, Creative Writing, RMIT University
Writers Victoria, one of a national network of centres providing crucial support and employment to writers, has lost its funding – putting its “very survival” at risk. Its loss would make Victoria (whose capital, Melbourne, is a UNESCO City of Literature) the only mainland state without a state government-funded peak organisation for writers.
Creative Victoria has provided emergency funding for the first six months of 2026. But it is not enough to cover existing contractual obligations to authors, staff salaries and a rental lease, Writers Victoria chair Janice Gobey told the Australian. She has launched a petition to the Parliament of Victoria to restore state funding. So far, it has garnered about 2,000 signatures.
Why does it matter if we lose Writers Victoria? What do these state and territory writers’ centres do? We’ve had them since South Australia opened the first one in 1985, roughly 40 years ago. Now, they “play a fundamental role in our literary ecosystem,” Jennifer Mills, chair of the Australian Society of Authors and Miles Franklin shortlisted author, told The Conversation.
Novelist Toni Jordan told us Writers Victoria was “instrumental” in the creation and success of her Miles Franklin longlisted debut novel, Addition, released as a feature film this week. “Writers Victoria workshops helped me write it, and I met my publisher at an ‘ask the publishers’ event run by Writers Victoria.” Mills met her first publisher at a similar writers’ centre event, run by NT Writers’ Centre.
Jordan described the organisation, which she became a patron of this month, as an “incubator for new generations of writing talent every year”. She worries about the established writers who might not reach this career stage in five or ten years without it.
While Mills praised writers’ centres’ role in helping new writers connect with community and professional opportunities, she also emphasised their role in supporting established ones. “Writers’ centres pay,” she said. “They directly employ authors and usually pay fair rates for appearances, workshops and mentoring.”
Not just a ‘Melbourne problem’
Writers Victoria received about A$150,000 per year from 2022 to 2025. The 37-year-old organisation is “now exploring alternative funding pathways, partnerships, and philanthropic solutions” for beyond June.
CEO Jill Brown told me the organisation “hasn’t bounced back” since 2020. She called this “a Melbourne problem”, related to the ongoing impact of the city’s long lockdowns.
This – along with cost-of-living pressures – manifested in a membership decline. In Writers Victoria’s last (2024) annual report, membership was 1,833 – a significant drop from 2,990 in the last pre-COVID report. Facing a budget deficit in 2025, the centre restructured in order to break even.
Gobey said over the past year, a new board and volunteers with financial expertise had “managed to get the business back on track and […] into the black” – after it had been “heading towards insolvency”.
This follows a scare for Writing NSW back in 2020, when Create NSW didn’t renew its multi-year funding. Late last year, the organisation was told it would be returning to multi-year Create NSW funding for 2026–2028. But at A$100,000 per year, CEO Sophie Groom told The Conversation, that funding is now exactly half the level of the previous two years.
Meanwhile, Tasmania’s writers’ centre, TasWriters, confirmed to The Conversation that it “has not received any organisational funding from the Tasmanian government for quite a number of years”. “In order to continue, we no longer have any paid staff.” The board now runs the organisation, with the help of additional volunteers.
What are writers’ centres for?
Brown contrasted the place of state and territory writers’ centres with writers festivals. “Writers festivals are not necessarily for writers,” she said. “They don’t teach writers how to write.” The Emerging Writers’ Festival is an exception in some ways, with its focus on developing new literary talent – but of course, most of its impact and public activity falls within its festival dates.
The core functions of writers’ centres include creative writing courses, workshops and manuscript assessments. They also support writers’ groups and run mentorships, competitions and residencies. But they also deliver bigger projects and sometimes advocate on behalf of writers. In 2020, for example, the ACT Writers Centre, since renamed Marion, wrote an open letter to the Canberra Writers Festival, criticising the lack of diversity in that year’s line-up.
The reach of writers’ centres goes well beyond their collective nationwide membership of approximately 10,000 people. The general public can attend the workshops and events they run – and often use their services, too (at higher prices).
There’s a subtle distinction here in what we mean by “writers”. In some settings, this word carries a sense of “professional” or “career” writer – someone who at least sometimes writes for a living (like most writers festival guests). But a writer is, after all, simply someone who writes – or, in Brown’s words, “someone who feels passionately about writing and words”.
Before the small minority of professional writers reach that point in their writing lives, they must learn such a thing is possible, and develop the skills to go about it.
Festivals, journals, workshops
Writers’ centres’ community aspect can radiate outwards into the broader literary sphere. Writers SA will reportedly be the “nexus point” of a planned “guerrilla” literary festival, to run in place of this year’s cancelled Adelaide Writers’ Week. CEO Claire Hicks told Adelaide’s InDaily it will “run the infrastructure for the event, including setting up an online portal, a ticketing system, establishing an advisory subcommittee and being responsible for any funds”.
The NT Writers Festival, founded in 1999 and alternating each year between Garramilla/Darwin (where the 2026 festival will be held) and Mparntwe/Alice Springs, is run by the Northern Territory Writers’ Centre. Writers Victoria’s Writeability program, which supports the professional development of disabled writers, received an accolade at the Victorian Disability Awards for its work.
NT Writers Festival.
The NT Writers Festival, run by the NT Writers Centre, is just one of the valuable contributions Australia's writers centres make.
Splinter, a newly established South Australian literary journal, is run by Writers SA. And among Queensland Writers Centre’s projects are GenreCon, Australia’s leading conference for genre fiction writers, Adaptable, which takes writers to pitch to screen industry professionals, and substantial youth programming.
Even from its precarious position, TasWriters continues its suite of programs. Among them are free workshops for young writers (funded by a project grant) and last year’s (unfunded) spring MiniFest in Hobart, which “was packed out for every session”, even making a profit.
‘A critical part of the pipeline’
State and territory writers’ centres began emerging 40 years ago, amid calls from local writers for more support.
In 2010, the Australia Council (now Creative Australia) attempted to merge state and territory writers’ centres, but this fell through.
Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award.
Pan Macmillan
Interestingly, the short-lived national body, comprising five writers’ centres, helped discover Hannah Kent and her internationally bestselling novel Burial Rites, when it won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award (which only ran twice). This led to Kent securing an agent and publishers around the world.
Today, Australia’s state and territory writers’ centres connect through the National Writers’ Centre Network, while maintaining specific local ways of working.
“It’s heartening to see Australia’s major writers festivals receiving additional support over recent years, and they play an important role in the sector,” Groom said. “At the same time, there’s a strong case to be made that writers’ centres are a critical part of the pipeline, providing year-round development, professional support and pathways for emerging writers. Without sustained investment in that early and mid-career space, it becomes much harder to ensure a healthy future for Australian writing.”
Without ‘sustained investment’ in the development space writers’ centres fill, ‘it becomes much harder to ensure a healthy future for Australian writing’, says Writing NSW CEO Sophie Groom.
Writing NSW
For writers’ centres, state and territory government grants are a significant part of what keeps them operating. As Brown put it, now “there’s more arts organisations looking for less funding”.
But state and territory writers’ centres are not all struggling in this moment. Arts Queensland recently announced an annual funding increase of A$120,000 per year to the Queensland Writers Centre.
The centre’s membership has nearly doubled in the past five years. It began making many of its courses available for live streaming just before COVID, in 2019, to make its workshops more accessible to the regional and remote writers who comprise around 40% of its membership.
Beneath individual stories of success and struggle lies a broader systemic issue – what Brown called a “silent effect” of wider declines in Australian reading culture. “Writers’ centres are under siege, in a way, because the broader culture is shifting towards more screen-based and solitary activities,” Brown said.
“Today’s broad access to online information and free writing resources has rendered the old model of ‘community access’ that underpinned traditional writers’ centres obsolete,” Meg Wilson, then CEO of ACT’s Marion, told Books+Publishing in 2022, when the organisation rebranded, explicitly differentiating it from other centres.
‘We need somewhere to come together’
As founding coordinator of Writing NSW Adele May once wrote:
The general perception of the lonely writer hammering away long night hours over the word processor or typewriter is slightly off beam. Idealistic and romantically clichéd as it may seem […] we need somewhere to come together – a place to commiserate, share our knowledge and ideas, to enjoy and celebrate our world of words.
Brown imagines a typical member as “in her sixties, writing a memoir, buying lots of books”, but without necessarily a clear pathway (or desire) to monetise or professionalise her literary pursuits. (Writers Victoria’s membership skews towards women.)
As creative writing researcher Julienne van Loon often argues, value in the writing world can be measured by more than economic success.
With this firmly in mind, Brown and her colleagues are on the search for alternative pathways for Writers Victoria’s future. “For the time being, we’re keeping the doors open,” she said. “We’re not giving up, and we’re not winding down at the moment.”
Authors: Angela Glindemann, PhD Candidate, Creative Writing, RMIT University
