Dropbear

Publisher's synopsis

An innovative collection of poetry and prose from a vibrant new Indigenous voice on the Australian literary scene.

I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.

This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.

Upcoming resource

Awards

Winner, 2022 The Stella Prize
Winner, 2022 Australian Book Industry Awards – Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year
Shortlisted, 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
Shortlisted, 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Indigenous Writing
Shortlisted, 2021 Queensland Literary Awards – Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection
Highly Commended, 2021 Anne Elder Award

Other Recommended Titles

Guwayu — For All Times

Inside My Mother

Too Much Lip

The Yield

Evelyn Araluen

Evelyn Araluen is a poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her widely published criticism, fiction and poetry has been awarded the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship, and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant. Born and raised on Dharug country, she is a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation. Evelyn’s debut collection Dropbear was shortlisted for the 2021 Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection and the 2022 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and won the 2022 Stella Prize. It was Highly Commended for the 2021 Anne Elder Award.

Photo by Stuart Spence, courtesy of UQP

Dropbear pushes genre boundaries and, more importantly, brings a rich intertextuality of entanglement – the messiness of the relationship between us and the history of the country that we can’t change and shouldn’t ignore.

Jeanine Leane

Further Details

Author Evelyn Araluen

Publisher UQP

Date of Publication 2021

ISBN 9780702263187

Category Poetry

Pages

112