President’s report
From the committee
I hope everyone is keeping well with all the bad news that seems to be out there at the moment. Hopefully Editors Victoria and IPEd can offer you some distraction from it all over the next couple of months.
March has been a busy month for the branch. We held a networking lunch, attended by over 15 people, and there was also a regional lunch in Ballarat, where 6 people attended, with another Ballarat lunch planned for 16 April.
Editors Victoria has a couple of great speaker events in the pipeline. A couple of weeks ago we were approached by Jessie Kindig, senior editor at Yale University Press in the US, and a contributing editor to Lux magazine. She is coming to Melbourne for the Melbourne Writers Festival and is keen to present for IPEd. EdsVic is organising a speaker event, which will take place on 12 May, while SCPD is organising a workshop to be run by Jessie. Keep an eye on the emails and Gatherings for more information on both events.
Our Events team has also been working away in the background to organise a talk on educational publishing and we are pleased to announce that Zia Rackho-Knight from Pearson Australia will be talking on the subject in the second half of May (date TBA). Titled “The clever country? Australian educational publishing in the age of AI”, Zia will discuss topics such as what it’s like to work for a multi-national publisher in Australia in 2026, how printed material co-exists with digital publications, outsourcing and working with third-party vendors, and the use of AI. She’ll also pose some questions about the future of Australian educational publishing. Another event not to miss! Watch the IPEd emails for more information on this event.
Our student advisor, Duncan Hale, is currently hard at work planning our popular biannual “Ask an editor”‘”session, which will be held online on 24 April. Three working editors will be on hand to answer questions from editing students on work opportunities and inside knowledge of the industry. Duncan will also moderate the session. Don’t forget that IPEd has a student membership drive on at the moment too – 15 months of membership for the price of 12.
Editors Victoria also held a planning day recently to discuss possible upcoming events and PD for our next term. We’ve got lots of fresh ideas, including a “speed-dating” event where editors and authors/publishers can meet and hopefully forge some new work opportunities! It will be based on a similar successful event held by the WA branch a few years ago. We’d like to see as many people as possible attend this in-person event. It will probably be on a weekday evening in a central Melbourne location. If there are any publishers, government and community organisations or authors out there looking to hire editors later in the year and who are interested in attending, we would love to hear from you (we figure we’ve got the editors side of things sorted for the moment!). You can contact me at edvic.president@iped-editors.org. I’ll keep you posted on our progress with this. For editors, it’s time to polish up those business cards!
So, you can see that there’s plenty on offer from IPEd and Editors Victoria to keep you occupied for the next couple of months while the world sorts itself out!
Welcome to our new members:
- Amy Leitans and Fiona O’Brien (Associate members)
- Nicolas Assaf (Student and Graduate Member)
Fiction book recommendations
Continuing on from our nonfiction book recommendations about “word people” (March 2026 Gatherings), this month we bring you some recommendations for fiction titles that feature characters who are writers or editors or where the story links to publishing/literature in some significant way:
Australian:
- Larissa Behrendt – After story
- Geraldine Brooks – People of the book
- Shankari Chandran – Chai times at Cinnamon Gardens
- Trent Dalton – Gravity let me go
- Sulari Gentill – The mystery writer, The women in the library, After she wrote him
- John Purcell – The girl on the page, The lessons
- Pip Williams – The dictionary of lost words, The bookbinder of Jericho
International:
- Andrew Sean Greer – Less
- Karen Joy Fowler – The Jane Austen Book Club
- Emily Henry – Book lovers, Beach read, Great big beautiful life
- Lily King – Writers and lovers, Heart the lover
- R.F Kuang – Yellowface
- Steven Rowley – The editor
Remember to let us know if we’ve missed any (we know we have!) by emailing edvic.communication@iped-editors.org.