Australia's city of literature could see the closure of its peak body for writers within six months, after it missed out on state government funding.
Writers Victoria has been running since 1989 and provides workshops, mentoring, and manuscript assessment services, as well as programs for disabled writers.
Its three staff had relied on $147,400 annually through Creative Victoria from 2022-2025, but the organisation was notified a week before Christmas that its latest funding application had been unsuccessful, said chair Janice Gobey.
"I can only think that Writers Victoria is a victim of the money needing to go elsewhere, to maybe building roads and tunnels or other deficits in the state," she told AAP.
Gobey warned the organisation would have to close by July unless alternative funding could be secured, and said this would make Victoria the only Australian state or territory without a peak writers' body.
It would mean writers wanting support will look interstate or overseas, said Gobey, and unique Victorian stories won't get told.
"What will happen? We're just going to end up in a very boring, beige McDonalds society, where everything's the same, you go to IKEA for art and you read something written by AI."
Creative Victoria has provided $70,000 in emergency funding until the end of June, but the organisation has yet to be able to access any of that money, Gobey said.
Award-winning author of The Animals in That Country, Laura Jean McKay, said she was devastated by the situation, while other writers have also expressed dismay.
"I am gobsmacked that the writers' centre in the state that hosts our global city of literature hasn't been prioritised for support," she told AAP.
Melbourne was designated as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2008, becoming only the second city worldwide to be awarded this status.
A petition to the Victorian Parliament calling for funding to be restored, sponsored by Liberal David Davis, has garnered around 3000 signatures so far.
Writing centres should be seen as essential by society, said the chair of the Australian Society of Authors, Jennifer Mills.
"They pay writers, they hire us to be mentors ... They create heaps of opportunities for professional development, and a lot of that stuff is not visible to the general public," she said.
Writers Victoria has had financial struggles of late. At the end of 2024 it was running a deficit of $131,818 with income from workshops and manuscript services falling and memberships in decline.
But by mid-2025 it was breaking even and continues to do so, according to Gobey.
Most Australian writers don't make much from their craft, with an authors' average annual income from writing $18,200 according to 2022 figures from Creative Australia.
The funding for Writers Victoria is a fraction of that granted to other literary organisations such as Melbourne's Wheeler Centre, which was allocated $6,166,400 from Creative Victoria in 2022-25.
A national literary body Writing Australia was launched in mid-2025 with $26 million in three-year federal funding, and ongoing annual funding of around $8.6 million, and it has recently launched its first round of grant opportunities for 2026.
Creative Victoria and Creative Australia have been contacted for comment.
