The Winter issue of Double Dialogues alerts us to what might be called 'the era of brokenness'. We arrived at this conclusion at the term of two Double Dialogues conferences—one held at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, the other convened at the National Opera Center in New York—where artists and academics sought to answer ‘why do things break?’ The year was 2017. A mind-boggeling and heart-breaking year… The works gathered here address the question of breakage in a variety of forms and styles, and from diverse perspectives, including ekphrastic responses to other media.