Ashley Hay

But I think what was fascinating in pulling together the Crimes and Punishments edition of Griffith Review was

was seeing the ways all the different genres could speak about crime and sort of unpack some of the kind of complexities and difficulties of trying to reduce things to an idea of justice or an idea of punishment or one kind of sort of definition of something.

Well, that's a bit of a moot point.

Opinion is divided about this.

I think our working definition this year was a piece of writing that was between 15,000 and 25,000 words long.

But you can find all sorts of different variations on those numbers.

I think it is, you know, the sort of most...

basic and unhelpful way of explaining it is it is longer than a short story and shorter than a novel, and it's sort of a piece that's a whole.

It's a whole in some way.

So Griffith Review has been running a novella project, an annual novella project.

This is our seventh.

edition.

I'm just very rapidly checking the back of the book, our seventh edition of this.

It's a competition that we run annually and we're supported by Copyright Australia's Cultural Fund to do this.

We call in a number of judges.

This year we had Holden Shepard, who was one of our winners from last year, Maxine Boniba-Clark and Aviva Tuffield to go through and help us choose a number of winners.

This year we had four, Julianne Van Loon, Keren Heenan,

Alanna Hunt and Miranda Rewo.

So Anna is one of the women who modelled for the Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin.

And I think Miranda is doing this really wonderful work in, as you say, through The Fish Girl and now through Anna the Javanese, exploring and in a sense reclaiming these figures who are, you know, just tucked in the edge of a different world.