Why are there so few new and exciting voices in Australian fiction? Why do Australian novels so consistently fail to capture the imagination of the reading public? What was the last Australian book you really liked? Where is the next generation of Australian authors going to come from? Who are three Australian writers under the age of thirty or forty?

Any reader of weekend newspapers will be familiar with this barrage of questions. Contemporary Australian fiction, we are told, is in trouble. It would seem that this is a problem facing the art form in all its incarnations. At this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival, the annual celebration of the short story was couched in terms of the crisis facing it. Australians don’t like short stories, we are told by publishers and media. They don’t want them, they don’t read them, and, crucially, they don’t buy them. While the short story should not be treated as some stylistic precursor to a cultural main event, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that if there were more opportunities for new writers to experiment with shorter projects – to test the boundaries, to fail and try again – the Great Australian Novel might seem like less of an impossibility.