Since the publication of the inaugural Best Australian Essays in 1998, Black Inc.’s ‘Best’ series has grown into an impressive franchise that now takes in the Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Poems and Best Australian Sportswriting. That, until this year, the essays, stories and regular Quarterly Essay should all have had a single editor, Peter Craven, seems in retrospect quite extraordinary. It was perhaps inevitable that such an empire would eventually fragment – evolving, say, into a rotating series of guest editorships under Craven’s direction. But his departure from Black Inc. early this year, after a disagreement with publisher Morry Schwartz over the future of the Quarterly Essay series, came as a shock to followers of this series.

The Craven empire was big, robust and energetic. Yes, the collections, with their growing page numbers, sometimes seemed so overstuffed you almost expected them to burp; yes, Best Australian Essays was sometimes so devoted to the topical issues of the day that I have heard myself grizzling that it ought perhaps to be renamed Best Australian Feature Writing. But with this rampant acquisitiveness came a sense of urgency and intervention that turned each issue into a literary event. Craven’s generous sense of mission as a critic, setting himself the task of assessing and rethinking the genres under his care, was no doubt part of the series’ growing impact. In his editorials, Craven was not afraid to pronounce – sometimes with a healthy dash of bombast – on the state of the nation and the state of the art.