Dropbear

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.

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

Prescribed text for NSW Syllabus English Extension 1: HSC 2027-2030.