Letter From the Publisher

We started the year by moving tens of thousands of physical books across state lines, swam through oceans of metadata and updated our back-end systems and website – all prompted by our switch in sales and distribution to Simon & Schuster from Penguin Random House. We thank both teams for their support during the offboarding and onboarding process.  

We are pleased to offer you a better user experience in your search for an MUP book on our new website. 

We hope you enjoy the new livery and functionality. This site will remain a work-in-progress for a while yet, as we tweak to optimise the discoverability of our books. 

You can always find MUP books at your local booksellers – we urge you to support them. They will happily order titles that cannot be found on their shelves, so always ask! 

If you prefer ebooks, you can now read them on a brand new MUP app. Select titles in our extensive backlist are available on a print-on-demand basis. 

MUP books are also readily available to readers in the US, Canada, UK and Europe as ebooks and print on demand, and more and more in bricks-and-mortar bookshops in the US and Canada from 1 July, thanks to our new partnership with S&S in New York. 

 

Our team of bookmakers have been hard at work on our stellar books this year, which are as diverse as they are exceptional. 

Steve Vizard’s Nation, Memory, Myth on the foundational myth of Gallipoli has been warmly embraced by a wide cross-section of readers, as have Rohan Howitt’s masterful account of Antarctica and Lesley Head’s hopeful meditation on our relationship with nature.  

Lovers of politics and current affairs can revisit landmark Australian policies in Jenny Macklin’s Making Progress, discover the secret deal that secured Julian Assange’s release from Belmarsh prison in Walkley-award-winning Andrew Fowler’s Most Dangerous Man in the World, and learn from Geoff Raby what China’s grand strategy in the age of Trump 2.0 entails. In coming months, look out for Albert Palazzo’s Big Fix and Clinton Fernandes’s Turbulence for incisive studies of Australia’s national security and sovereignty in these uncertain times.  

For readers of Australian lives, we have books by Wayne Atkinson and Catherine Guinness and John and Ros Moriarty in our Miegunyah Indigenous list, alongside Shayne Breen’s book on Tasmania’s deep history.  

2025 is the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. We are honoured to be publishing a life of Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow – hibakusha and 2017 Nobel peace prize winner for her work with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. 

There is much more bookish and Meanjin goodness to come, which we’ll share in upcoming bulletins. 

 

MUP is committed to the power of the book. So, like other publishers, we were disappointed to learn that books by our authors have been appropriated by giant tech companies to train large language models. We are working with the Australian Publishers Association, Copyright Agency and the Australian Society of Authors, who are pushing the government to address the breaches.  

We recognise that AI can offer new opportunities, but copyright must be protected and creators’ work properly acknowledged and compensated. As an industry, we need guardrails, and the ongoing AI ingestion of Australian titles requires a coordinated national – and international – response.  

If you are a published writer, we recommend that you use the Atlantic’s tool to check if your work is included in the latest Library Genesis dataset that Meta used. Please register the inclusion with the ASA so they can better advocate for better regulation and protection for creators.  

 

Your experience with our website matters to us, so please let us know what you think. 

 

Very happy reading to you until we catch up again.