The Critics Report

2025 has certainly been an eventful year in the arts and culture. Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale was withdrawn and then reappointed. The country’s second oldest literary journal, Meanjin, was shuttered, while Southerly, its oldest, has just been rebooted. Here and across the world, artists and writers have had to contend with the institutional encouragement and enforcement of self-censorship, while the unauthorised use of copyrighted material to train AI platforms threatens to devalue work that is already under-remunerated. 

What role do critics have to play in this increasingly precarious environment? How does our critical culture help advocate for the importance and independence of creative work? Join the Sydney Review of Books Editors, James Jiang and Tiffany Tsao, and their special guests – Daniel Browning (University of Sydney, formerly ABC), Nick Croggon (Memo Review), and Roanna Gonsalves (Southerly) – for a round-up of the year’s most consequential events in the arts and culture, and an enlivening discussion about the state of critical play in Australia. 

SPEAKERS:

Professor of Indigenous Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sydney, Daniel Browning is a Bundjalung and Kullilli writer, journalist, and radio broadcaster. In his thirty-year career with the ABC, Daniel read news for triple j, presented and produced programs on Awaye!, established the shortform podcast Word Up, and hosted The Art Show (2021-2025). In 2024, his first book, Close to the Subject won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Indigenous Writing Prize in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. He jointly won the inaugural Arts Journalism and Arts Criticism Prize in 2025 with ABC colleagues Rudi Bremer and Teresa Tan. 

Nick Croggon is an art historian and public program coordinator at the Power Institute at The University of Sydney. Nick has expertise in the history of art and technology, and recently completed his PhD in art history from Columbia University on the history of early video art in North America. He also writes on contemporary Australian art, and is an editor of Memo Review. 

Roanna Gonsalves is an award-winning writer and educator. She is the new Editor of Southerly, Australia's oldest literary journal. In 2025, she co-convened the State Library of NSW Friends Book Club. She is a recipient of a NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the UNSW Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, and the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award. She is the co-convenor of the Literary Provocations Hub in the School of the Arts & Media, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture at UNSW where she works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UNSW. 

James Jiang is Editor of the Sydney Review of Books. Prior to joining the SRB, he was Assistant Editor at Griffith Review and Australian Book Review. He received his PhD in modernist literature from the University of Cambridge and has taught in the English and Theatre Studies program at the University of Melbourne. His essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and generalist publications in Australia and abroad. 

Tiffany Tsao is Deputy Editor of the Sydney Review of Books. She is also a novelist and literary translator. Her translations of Indonesian literature have been awarded the NSW Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN Translation Prize and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Her fourth novel, But Won’t I Miss Me, will be coming out with HarperVia in May 2026. She holds a PhD in English from UC-Berkeley.