Welcome to ilura press

Ilura Press is an independent boutique publishing house founded in 2006. We specialise in quality fiction and produce the creative journal Etchings. We hope you enjoy browsing through our website.

Colourful, playful, and particularly creative, the Chameleons issue abounds with ideas of change, disguise, double identities, and purely ephemeral moments of beauty.
Jean-François Vernay probes the complex relationship between fiction and psychoanalysis. Theresa Mason invokes startling imagery with her creative non-fiction personification of the Australian bushfires. Gabriel Garcia's fictional viewer takes us on a retrospective journey through the Water Hole exhibition of Swiss artists Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger, held at the Australian Contemporary Centre for the Arts in Melbourne earlier this year. Inga Walton invites Melbourne-based Thai artist Bundit Puangthong to speak about the cultural fusion in his artwork featuring the bright colours and iconography of traditional Thai paintings. Pattern and narrative are explored in Douglas Kirwan's intricate paintings which stir ‘an optical whirlpool that obstructs the isolation of a single shape' (Claudia Terstappen).
The strength of the fiction abounds throughout Chameleons, including a preview from Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee offering a pre-release glimpse into his fictional biographical new novel, Summertime, to be published in the UK later this year. Sallie Muirden creates a vivid and eccentric female character who has a sheep as a companion. Heather Fowler shows us familiar human traits, emotions, and attitudes through characters with wings, and others with eyes on their backs. And a beautiful moment between two old ladies sharing their memories in a story titled ‘Ducks' by A. S. Patric.
The poetry in this issue ranges from short intense and quirky pieces to longer reflective and thought provoking works, all creating a mysterious, haunting, delightful play on the theme of Chameleons. Enjoy!

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The Ethical Issue' invokes a thought-provoking reading experience, featuring an essay on the ethical dimension of translation by Jacques Rancourt, poet and director of the Anglo-French Poetry Festival, complemented by a series of French poems and their English translations. An insight into the Darwinian ethics of one of the greatest and most controversial writers of the 20th century, Nikos Kazantzakis, is offered by Kazantzakis scholar and translator Peter Bien.

The art feature of this issue comprises a conversation piece between Kevin Rabalais, author of Landscape of Desire, and Matthew Hooper, artist and writer, as they explore the written and painted landscapes within their work. And Melbourne photojournalist Dave Tacon takes us to Sierra Leone, giving us a stunning visual and written account of one of the world's poorest countries.

Also included in this collection: short fiction by Ryan O'Neill, Prue Gibson, Susie Greenhill, Thomas Shapcott, Shannon Burns, Jason Cotter, Vivienne Christie, Michael Crane, and Patrick Holland, as well as a substantial body of new poetry.

‘The Ethical Issue' will make you reflect, wonder, hope, and re-consider.