Literary Journals

Australia is home to a wide variety of both new and long-established high-quality literary journals that demonstrate the breadth of Australian creative talent and you’ll struggle to find a genre, style or form of writing that isn’t represented. A selection of Australian literary journals can be found below:

Archer is an award-winning print publication about sexuality, gender and identity, Archer Magazine is published in Melbourne, Australia, with a focus on lesser-heard voices and the uniqueness of our experiences.

Australian Book Review is an independent, not-for-profit monthly magazine, Australian Book Review (ABR) is one of Australia’s major cultural magazines. ABR presents high-quality journalism and new writing for the widest possible audience. It engages with all the arts, not just literature. It is diverse in terms of content, writers, and partners.

Griffith Review is a quarterly literary journal. Every edition explores a different theme, bringing together long-form critical and analytical non-fiction and creative writing from the finest emerging and established writers from Australia and overseas.

Island is a not-for-profit organisation that produces a high-quality print magazine of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, art criticism and visual art. Since 1979, Island have been celebrating ideas, writing and culture, and while the magazine’s format and editors have changed over time, their mission remains the same: to produce a magazine with a national vision and audience that supports new, emerging and established writers and artists, and to bring works of excellence and variety to the reading public throughout Australia and overseas.

Kill Your Darlings was founded by Rebecca Starford and Hannah Kent and is one of Australia’s leading arts and culture magazines.

Beginning life as a print quarterly in 2010, KYD is today a vibrant and eclectic online magazine of commentary, essays, interviews, fiction and reviews.

For over 80 years, Meanjin has fostered a rich and rigorous national conversation by remaining true to its founding principles: ‘to talk poetry’, ‘to work for a healthy climate of opinion and literary activity’, and ‘to make clear the connection between art and politics.’ In 2026, custodianship of the magazine transferred to Queensland University of Technology. 

Overland is Australia’s only radical literary magazine, showcasing brilliant and progressive fiction, poetry, nonfiction and art since 1954. The magazine has published some of Australia’s most iconic writers, and continues to give space to underrepresented voices and brand-new literary talent every single day.

Voiceworks is a national literary journal that features exciting new writing and art by young Australians. Our purpose is to create a space for people under twenty-five to develop their creative and editorial skills and to publish, and be paid for, their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art and comics. Voiceworks is published by Express Media, a not-for-profit organisation that provides support and development opportunities for young people in the literary arts.

Since 1956, Westerly has been publishing lively fiction and poetry as well as intelligent articles. The magazine has always sought to provide a Western Australian-based voice, although its contributors and subject matter have never been geographically exclusive.  It covers literature and culture throughout the world, but maintains a special emphasis on Australia, particularly Western Australia, and the Asian region.