Cirrus@Austlit

Linnet Hunter interviews Shaun Tan about his compelling artwork and the 'imaginative universes' he continues to create, showcased in his latest book Tales from Outer Suburbia. Tan discusses the interplay between the words and pictures that produce his 'style' of illustration and some of the reasons his latest picture book is also formatted as a collection of short stories.

Libby Gleeson discusses how she developed and then researched her novel Mahtab's Story. Gleeson originally planned that the story would involve a refugee student telling a young Australian school girl about her journey from her homeland to Australia. However, Gleeson soon realised that she needed to do additional research to construct the refugee Muslim teenager character. She describes how she met with refugee students from a Sydney high school to create an 'informed fiction' based on processes of storytelling and story-sharing.

The Residential Editorial Campaign is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and by publishing houses. In 2008, its fifth year, it was held in Toowoomba where the focus, as introduced by the keynote speaker Michael Heyward, was on 'the importance of the "conversation" between author and editor and of the editors role in championing the author's work' (20). Award winning writer of Young Adult fiction, Margo Lanagan and her editor Rosalind Price, spoke of their twenty year working relationship, where Lanagan said she often felt she presented her editor with 'a senseless mosiac of ideas' (21).