Michael Campbell

And people know him.

Well, again, through that fellowship program, we have got, coming out in May from Giramondo, The Hijab Files, Mariam Azam.

She got mentored with Judith Beveridge, a collection of poetry.

And that's extraordinary.

It's direct poetry, it is potent poetry, and it explores...

what it's like to be a woman, a millennial, with a hijab in Western Sydney and what that actually means and how to navigate the sort of, you know, being 20-something.

And last year alone, what we do is that we bring published writers who've been through the crucible of publishing into Mentor The Next Generations.

And what we do is that we work with 92 writers, illustrators, editors, allied art form last year alone.

And those people included people like Felicity Castagna, the incredible here and now, Luke Carman, elegant young man, all of those people.

And quite honestly, a lot of Western Sydney artists, we work with 62 people.

62% of our writers last year were from Western Sydney, so writing locally in.

But sometimes you don't know people are from Western Sydney because, one, they don't advertise themselves like the way.

They also, they might have international careers, especially when you're talking speculative fiction.

Diverse writers and writing doesn't mean writers of colour.

Diverse means people who are coming from a whole range of cultures, a whole range of perspective, a whole range of socioeconomic levels, and the cultural context from around the world is completely different.

It doesn't mean simply writers of colour.

Well, what I did was I went to my personal bookshelves.

They're physical bookshelves.

I live in an old Federation place, very long corridor.

And I started wandering those books.