Welcome to 2016 and the 24th issue of Kill Your Darlings. After three exciting years at KYD, this will be my final issue. As editor I have had the privilege of working with over 100 writers and I am endlessly proud of the work we have produced together. It has been an honour to be part of the KYD team, which really is a bunch of the hardest working and most talented people around.
I am happy to be returning the magazine to publishing directors Rebecca Starford and Hannah Kent, who will resume editing KYD. Thank you for letting me borrow your baby! I’m pleased to announce that Hop Dac will now become KYD’s associate editor and Ashleigh Hanson has been promoted to deputy editor. Under their guidance, as well as the tireless contributions of Gerard Elson and Meaghan Dew, that the magazine will continue to go from strength to strength.
I am also thrilled to present new design by Guy Shield. You may know Guy as our incredibly talented cover illustrator and we are now lucky to have him beautify our interior pages as well.
You will see a new layout, with some reinvigorated categories, but the same great Australian writing. Jennifer Down and Marika Sosnowski send us dispatches from Berlin and Lebanon, while in First Person Laura Woollett follows the trail of Jim Jones and Melanie Joosten recounts life in an intercultural relationship.
In this issue we also continue our investigation into the state of publishing with Nathan Smith looking at the New York Review of Books’ role in reviving lost classics and Siobhan Lyons examining the myth of the rejected author, while Rowena Lennox remembers the music of Led Zeppelin.
In the Culture Files, Lauren Carroll Harris uses the 1952 movie Kangaroo to interrogate the lie of Australian classlessness, Simmone Howell revisits Judy Blume’s Forever, and Lou Heinrich looks at a new true crime genre that is dominated by Australian women.
We have New Fiction from Melanie Myers, Dom Amerena and Justina Ashman, winner of the Monash Undergraduate Prize for Creative Writing, presented as part of the 2015 Emerging Writers’ Festival.
In Conversations, Gerard speaks with Canadian novelist and journalist Lynn Coady about the importance of opening scenes, life on literary juries and why maintaining a healthy cynicism is important.
Thank you to all the readers, writers, subscribers and booksellers for your support over the last three years. Special thanks to Veronica Sullivan and Emily Laidlaw who somehow managed to support me while also making Killings one of the best dang websites around, and to Hop Dac for being the best deputy an editor could ask for. I’m looking forward to seeing what the amazing team at KYD does next.
