Star Making

This article focuses directly on Thea Astley’s publishing history from the time of her involvement with Brisbane’s avant garde in the 1950s, her early inclusion in regional collections, and her emergence as a Miles Franklin prize-winning author, through the enabling pen and advocacy of one of Angus & Robertson (A&R)’s finest fiction editors, Beatrice Davis, to the establishment in the 1980s of Astley’s ultimate author-publisher relationship with Penguin Books and her own overseas literary agent. It will also examine the publishing trajectory of selected novels released and re-issued by the University of Queensland Press (UQP) and Penguin Books, and revisit the divides between writer and editor, publisher and publicist, and the dis/enabling inspiration of difference in the tropics, in the context of the gendered histories of publishing at A&R, Penguin Books and UQP

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