Twice as Many Stars: New Writing from Western Sydney

Twice as Many Stars balances radiant hope with grief and shadow, wicked humour with gravity. As the world began to wake in 2022 from pandemic slumbers and strange isolations, the twelve artists who joined The Writing Zone—a mentoring program run by the Writing and Society Research Centre and the Sydney Review of Books—ventured out into cities lying dormant under taller skies. Galaxy-sized spaces between them became more like the Milky Way: a neighbourhood with room for them all. Twice as Many Stars brings together stories, poems, essays and scripts about love, loss and family. It dives into diasporic futurisms and builds fantastical worlds, sometimes showing us more about ourselves than might feel comfortable. The authors of this third anthology by The Writing Zone share intimate and treasured accounts of big and small sorrows and survivals, traversing spectral states and transcultural realities while making us look twice at things