Introducing: Constellations
And a few other things to share
It has been a big few weeks. Pink Shorts author Olivia De Zilva and Pink Shorts friend Holly Gramazio both said it very well. We’ve said lots of things already (will we ever again be doorstopped by Channel 10?), so won’t say too much about it here, except to introduce you to Constellations, a one-off umbrella festival in response to the fall-out of Adelaide Writers’ Week 2026.
So many people across the South Australian writing, publishing and bookselling community have been working together to make this happen. We’ll have an event to announce soon, in place of the special Pink Shorts Press up-late evening that was meant to happen on the Monday of AWW.
If you’d like to get involved by hosting an event, volunteering or donating, you can find more information here.
By the way, we have four titles launching in March.
There’s drama. There’s dissent. There’s humour and light. We only release books twice a year, so we make sure they’re always good ones.
Angry Scared Laughing is lesbian aunty Mag Merrilees’s rousing collection on activism and aging, which reminds us that we’re always living in ‘unprecedented times’.
Pearls is Tracy Crisp’s beautifully moving and endlessly relatable memoir-in-stories of grief, ambition and dropped stitches, born out of her award-winning stage shows.
Yñiga won Glenn Diaz his second Philippine National Book Award but was written on Kaurna Yerta as part of his PhD; it’s both a political thriller and a literary gem about the possibility of everyday resistance.
A Concise Compendium of Wonder is a triptych of fairytales reimagined for our age of climate anxiety, from star authors Jennifer Mills, Ursula Dubosarsky and Ceridwen Dovey, published to coincide with Slingsby’s Adelaide Festival productions.
Available to pre-order here or at your local bookstore. If you order all four titles, you get both a discount and a very special squid bag that tells the world that reading really is radical.
Our 2025 books are all there to nab too, including in their own pack (bag also included). Olivia De Zilva’s Plastic Budgie keeps getting excellent reviews. And Jo Case wrote a beautiful piece on going back to Barbara Hanrahan’s diaries after our new editions.
Look out for upcoming publicity, which may or may not involve cross-stitch kits and a badge maker (open to any other entry-level craft suggestions). And if you’d like to review any of our books or interview our authors for any publications, please always reach out.
Wordshops ahead.
Our next two Wordshops, on editing fiction and non-fiction, are almost sold out. We’ll be announcing some more sessions for writers very soon, so let us know if there’s a topic or a time you’d like to see.
We also ran a brand voice Wordshop with the lovely team at the National Wine Centre last week, helping them to clarify and codify exactly how they want their comms to sound. It was a lot of fun (and apparently ‘one of the most practical professional development sessions’ they’ve participated in). If you’d like to explore something similar, there’s an enquiry form on our website.
But wait, there’s more (events).
We are co-hosting a couple of fun Adelaide Fringe events: UNABRIDGED with Olivia De Zilva and Opinionated, and Books & Beers with Alex Cothren (what it says on the tinnie), both featuring an amazing line-up of writers.
And there are festival and bookshop events to announce across SA, Victoria, Tasmania and NSW in the coming months. For now, stay cool – and change the date.
Hello to all those who are new to Wordshopping, the semi-regular newsletter from Pink Shorts Press. Usually it has more links and rambling thoughts about independent publishing, although sometimes we remember that we also have things to promote. If you’d like to support us and prefer getting your books from the library (we love libraries), please consider forwarding this email to a friend.