GRAI’s Queer Book Club has selected Throat by Mununijali Yugambeh author, Ellen van Neerven as its book for April.
They write fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and play football on unceded Turrbal and Yuggera land. van Neerven’s first book, Heat and Light , a novel-in-stories, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize.
Their 2016 poetry collection Comfort Food won the Tina Kane Emergent Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize.
Throat is van Neerven’s latest poetry collection which was released in 2020, it’s the recipient of the inaugural Quentin Bryce Award, a finalist in the Queensland Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s 2021 Literary Awards.
The collections is described as a work that explores love, language and land, while shining a light on Australia’s unreconciled past and precarious present with humour and heart.
Take a listen to Julie Koh reading one of the poems from the collection.
OIP Staff
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