Personal Score

Publisher's synopsis

From an award-winning First Nations author, a ground-breaking examination of sport’s troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality.

Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays football from a young age, learning early on that sport can be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realise about sport’s troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality – and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises.

With emotional honesty and searing insight, van Neerven shines a light on sport on this continent from a queer First Nations perspective, revealing how some athletes have long challenged mainstream views and used their roles to effect change not only in their own realm, but in society more broadly. Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that confirms, once again, van Neerven’s unrivalled talent, courage and originality.

Upcoming resource

Awards

Winner, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2024 – Non-Fiction
Shortlisted, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2024 – Indigenous Writing
Shortlisted, The Age Book of the Year Award – Non-fiction
Shortlisted, 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction
Shortlisted, 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Indigenous Writers’ Prize
Shortlisted, 2024 Queensland Literary Awards – Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance
Shortlisted, 2024 Queensland Literary Awards – The University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award
Shortlisted, 2024 South Australian Literary Awards – Non-fiction Award
Longlisted, 2024 ALS Gold Medal
Longlisted, the 2024 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award
Longlisted, 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction

Other Recommended Titles

The F Team

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia

The Hate Race

Meet Me at the Intersection

Ellen van Neerven

Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers’ Prize. They are the author of two poetry collections: Comfort Food, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize; and Throat, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Multicultural NSW Award and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Their memoir, Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction in 2024.

Bio: UQP
Photo: Anna Jacobson, courtesy of UQP

Sport plays a central role in Australian life, yet remains one of the final frontiers of reckoning with who belongs within it and who has been discarded in its journey towards ubiquity. This work lays bare the many unspoken threads tangled up in modern Australian sport, from relationships with bodies to relationships with land, and highlights the paradox of sport as both a liberator and exterminator of difference, as told from the perspective of a queer First Nations writer – of which this space contains so few. Splicing together personal memoir with history, journalism, and throbbing poetry, this is a crucial interjection into the myths we tell about ourselves as a sporting nation, coalescing in a new and necessary kind of sports writing.

Samantha Lewis, sports journalist and commentator

Further Details

Author Ellen van Neerven

Publisher UQP

Date of Publication 2023

ISBN 9780702265853

Category Memoir, Non-Fiction

Pages

384