This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction

Publisher's synopsis

A world-first collection of blackfella speculative fiction from well-known and emerging First Nations writers.

The first-ever anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander speculative fiction – written, curated, edited and designed by blackfellas, for blackfellas and about blackfellas. In these stories, ‘this all come back’: all those things that have been taken from us, that we collectively mourn the loss of, or attempt to recover and revive, as well as those that we thought we’d gotten rid of, that are always returning to haunt and hound us.

Some writers summon ancestral spirits from the past, while others look straight down the barrel of potential futures, which always end up curving back around to hold us from behind. Dazzling, imaginative and unsettling, This All Come Back Now centres and celebrates communities and culture. It’s a love letter to kin and country, to memory and future-thinking.

Includes stories by

Upcoming resource

Awards

Winner, Aurealis Awards 2022 — Best Anthology
Longlisted, Booktopia FAB Awards 2022

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Mykaela Saunders

Dr Mykaela Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher and researcher, and the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis Award–winning, world-first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP, 2022). Always Will Be won the 2022 David Unaipon Award. Mykaela’s novel manuscript Last Rites of Spring was also shortlisted for the Unaipon Award in 2020, and received a Next Chapter Fellowship in 2021. Mykaela has won the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, the National Indigenous Story Award, the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Prize for creative non-fiction and the University of Sydney’s Sister Alison Bush Graduate Medal for Indigenous research. Of Dharug descent, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community through her Bundjalung and South Sea Islander family. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education since 2003, and at the tertiary level since 2012. They are currently an Indigenous postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University, researching First Nations speculative fiction.

Photo courtesy of UQP

Playful, bitter, loud and proud … I recommend this anthology to readers interested in good fiction generally and speculative fiction in particular. But most emphatically, I recommend it to anyone who might wonder what a First Nations response to the question of our potential future might look like.

The Conversation

Further Details

Author Mykaela Saunders

Publisher UQP

Date of Publication 2022

ISBN 9780702265662

Category Anthology

Pages

368