Borderstream Books, book and journal publisher, is now based in Victoria, Australia, it was founded in 2017 by Ruth Skilbeck. Earlier, it was located in Newcastle, NSW. Previously, she founded Postmistress Press in 2013; and Arts Features International, art writing business, in 2003 in Sydney, later she reinvented Arts Features International as an arts anthology-journal.

Novels, non-fiction books, short books, a journal, and anthologies.

As well as her own books, she has also published books by authors with literary works in the journal she founded, Arts Features International [see further details in footnotes at the foot of this webpage]. That includes Behrouz Boochani. Dr Ruth Skilbeck, PhD, is acknowledged by Garry W. Trompf in his review in The Journal of Religious History, to be the first author to have written on Behrouz in a serious monograph, namely her March 2017 edition of her book, The Writer’s Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity. She wrote on his work two years before he won major literary awards in Australia in 2019 (when Behrouz Boochani was incarcerated in Manus Island detention centre; in 2016, she contacted him via Facebook message).

"I dare anybody to read this book. The author of “fugal novels,” Ruth Skilbeck pulls out all stops and works vigorously on the treadles of literary philosophy to produce a veritable fugue of scholarship, sounding many notes important for religious history… [Skilbeck is]...the first to write anything in a serious monograph about Behrouz Boochani, the Iranian‐Kurdish refugee on Manus who was to win the lucrative Victorian Prize for Literature (2019) after sensationally sending a book, snatch after snatch on WhatsApp, from his incarceration on Manus to his Sydney translator Omid Tofighian…"
Read the full review by Garry W. Trompf, in the Journal of Religious History, in the Wiley Online Library here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9809.12642

Borderstream Books has published works by 70 authors, artists and filmmakers and musicians in Arts Features International (published in hardback, and paperback, and as an online electronic journal in ebook-pdf to be read on a computer/device, fulfilling the Wikipedia definition of an online journal and serial). Each edition of AFI has a different title. Our books are published in paperback, and hardback and as ebooks. The books in eb00k-pdf formats can be accessed in state libraries in Australia. You can buy Borderstream books here on this website, and in online and ‘bricks and mortar’ bookshops across Australia and around the world.

Borderstream Books

Publisher of fiction novels, literary studies, essays, poetry, an arts journal, anthologies, and artists' books.

Contact

Borderstream Books mail@borderstreambooks.com.au

The Borderstream Books artist publisher, editor, book designer and author is a woman of many hats. Her focus is on writing, arts and publishing in her publishing business, which includes writing, making art images, editing, typesetting, book and cover design.

Submissions

Borderstream Books is not able to accept submissions. This may change in the future, and a notice will be placed on this website if so.

Borderstream Books- new world literary arts publishing and writers and artists books.

About Ruth Skilbeck, Borderstream Books’ founder Editor-in-Chief of Arts Features International. Publisher at Borderstream Books. Award-winning arts journalist, and author of novels and literary studies books, peer-reviewed articles, essays, and book chapters, poetry, images, and short stories. Has exhibited her photographs, and curated a group exhibition, in addition to curating works in journal issues and anthologies, she peer-reviewed articles as an academic.

Ruth Skilbeck has a PhD and MA (Writing) from the University of Technology Sydney and a BA Honours in Philosophy from the University of London. She has worked professionally as a writer, artist and journalist since 1982, when the Irish Times published her first feature article, ‘Down Under Days’, on moving to Australia at the age of 16, from Northern Ireland with her family. She became a member of the National Union of Journalists Dublin Freelance Branch and, later, the London Freelance Branch, and the MEAA in Australia. She worked as a freelance journalist writer and artist in Dublin and London, later moving back to Australia in the 1990s, with her young family, and focusing then on writing as a freelance journalist on Australian and international contemporary art for arts periodicals, later also including her photographs of artists and artworks. She also taught writing and journalism and was a media lecturer at the University of New South Wales, and UTS. Most recently she has written and published several books, including novels and literary studies, in addition to founding and running her publishing business, and editing and publishing several issues of Arts Features International journal and anthologies. Her grants include an Australia Council of the Arts (Visual Arts) New Work for arts writing. She was awarded a Pick of the Month Award by the BBC World Service Book Choice for that month’s highest ratings for her write-and-read broadcast book talk, early in her career, in London. Her work as an artist and novelist has been on TV in Australia.

Borderstream Books - name

If you are wondering where the inspiration for the publisher name came from, it is an English translation of Ruth’s Nordic surname, Skilbeck, which means border stream in Norwegian (skille bekk). Her father’s father was from Yorkshire in the north of England, where the surname in English originated in a (now lost) village called Skilbeck which was named after the Norsemen who settled there, in the eighth century. Her ancestors on her mother’s and father’s sides emigrated to Australia from Ireland and England, by sailing ship in the 19th century (on her mother’s Irish side in 1803).