Literary organisations receive $140k in Catalyst funding

Five literary sector organisations have received a total of $140,200 from the Catalyst—Australian Arts and Culture Fund as part of its first annual $12m funding round, announced on 2 May.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival received $75,200 for its digital outreach strategy in the innovation and participation funding category. The funds will ‘support two digital activities that provide access to Sydney Writers’ Festival content for regional audiences’.

In the international and cultural diplomacy funding category, Island Press received $10,000 for its touring poets program, with the funds going towards airfares and travel insurance for four Australian poets to attend ‘major poetry festivals across three continents’; and the NT Writers’ Centre received $18,000 for its festival exchange program with South East Asian writers’ festivals, including Ubud, Yogyakarta and Singapore.

In the partnerships and collaboration funding category, literary journal Going Down Swinging received $22,500 to support its 2016 national program of ‘print, digital publishing, audio recordings and live events’; and Puncher & Wattman received $15,000 for a contemporary poetry anthology, ‘the first major survey of Australian work since 1990’.

The GLAM Peak Bodies, under the auspices of the Library Council of NSW, also received $110,000 to ‘support the development of a sector-implemented national strategic framework and toolkit to support the digital access to Australia’s cultural collections’.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, the Catalyst fund replaced the controversial National Program for Excellence in the Arts in November 2015, with $32m in funding returned to the Australia Council—just under a third of the $110m stripped from the Australia Council over four years in the 2015-16 federal budget.

To view the full list of Catalyst funding recipients, click here.

Category: Local news