Two weeks before Christmas, the Literature Board of the Australia Council notified Quadrant of the outcome of our application for a 2010 literary grant. Although we had been led to believe our previous $50,000 annual grant would be increased, the new Rudd government appointees of the Literature Board decided our funding would be reduced by 30 per cent, to only $35,000. This was a serious blow to our budget since for the previous two years we had increased the magazine from 96 to 128 pages per edition and had actively recruited a range of new writers. We no longer had…