Michael Campbell

And we provide that and the support networks and the career development and these sort of steps that...

writers need to go from one place to the next place in order to get some ideas about how they research, editing, all the structural elements of their craft.

What we do is that we are a service organisation, so we serve the writers, we serve the art form, and we also serve the audiences.

So we cultivate audiences for the writing.

So we, last year...

partnered with 52 organisations, including 16 schools.

And we do that because our definition of what writing is within Western Sydney context is a broad definition of what writing is.

In Western Sydney, just to contextualise this, one in 11 Australians live in Greater Western Sydney.

There are over 150 cultures, over 170 language groups.

There are places in Western Sydney where English is the third most popular language spoken.

You'll walk into a school where 97.5% of the school's population is non-Anglo.

There is an extraordinary melting pot of such diverse cultures, such diverse perspectives, such diverse experience and such diverse ways in which writers, artists more in general, express their culture.

Well, what we do is we start in primary school, pre-primary school, and we start and we take cohorts of writers and we do residencies into schools.

And also we do take it to the next step, which is those writers who are on the verge of publication.

And we do that through mentorships, through fellowships.

So, for example, Peter Pilates down the Hume, he came to us for one of those fellowships applied in 2015 with about 30,000 to 40,000 words.

And we gave him a fellowship.

We made a tailored program of mentorship and he finished that manuscript.

It then went to Hachette Australia.

It then got published in February last year.