Terri-ann White was Director of UWA Publishing (2006–20). In 1999, she established the Institute of Advanced Studies, a cross-disciplinary centre at the University of Western Australia. She has been an independent bookseller and writer. In 2021, she established a new publishing house, Upswell Publishing, based in Perth and building a list of distinctive literary works in fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction.

What was your pathway to publishing?

A pathway of passion. Corny but true. A lucky break in my university career: asked to develop a creative writing list for a seventy-year-old publishing house that had never published fiction and poetry. I started the task by writing to people I trusted in universities around the country asking for the best work by their students, as I knew most were not being published. The first book I published was Josephine Wilson’s first novel, Cusp, in 2005. (I also published her second novel.)

How many titles do you publish each year?

When I announced Upswell in early 2021, I declared I’d be doing four to ten books each year. I released the first three at the end of 2021 and somehow managed to release eighteen in 2022, my first full year. I’m a maniac, but perhaps I was also getting something out of my system. Each of these books was given dedicated attention before being released.