Literary agent Jane Novak was sitting with a friend at Sydney Writers’ Festival waiting for Richard Flanagan’s closing address. But what was really occupying the two women was not the imminent talk, but the lack of involvement of Australia’s literary community in the campaign for an Indigenous Voice to parliament.

They had seen various sporting codes come out in support, but were surprised writers had not made a similar commitment to back the Yes vote in the upcoming referendum.

Late last week, the Writers for the Voice website went live and already about 400 writers have added their names to it. “I got about 200 emails over the weekend,” Novak said. Among the signatories are Helen Garner, Anna Funder, Stan Grant, Shankari Chandran, Peter Doherty, Richard Flanagan, Tom Keneally, and many other writers.

Novak says her friend told her, “if you do something, I’ll help you,” and that’s how it started. They spent a lot of time talking about what they could do and how, and paid for the development of the website, which includes background information explaining the long lead-up to the referendum, the proposed changes to the constitution, and information about how the Voice will operate. The material had been approved by constitutional lawyer Professor Megan Davis, who sat on the prime minister’s Referendum Council, she added.

Indigenous novelist Anita Heiss is one of four writers acting as ambassadors for the campaign.

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“As this is about the ‘story of the nation’ writers have a responsibility as storytellers to take a stand,” she said. “They need to reach out to the devoted readers and share the reasons why they are voting Yes!”

Heiss, whose most recent novel, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray, is about the complicated relationship between two families, one Indigenous, one white, at the time of the Gundagai floods in 1852, said she would be using her platforms to remind people who are unsure how to vote that the referendum is about principle: “If you support the Uluru Statement from the Heart in principle, if you believe in principle that we deserve recognition, that we deserve a say in the affairs that impact us, then there is your answer.”

Novelist Kate Grenville, whose bestselling novel The Secret River depicted the stealing of land and deadly clashes between the Indigenous population and British colonisers, said on the website that the violence of the past could not be undone.