Poet Evelyn Araluen has taken out the 2022 Stella Prize for her book Dropbear, the first time poetry has been eligible for the award | KerrieO36028873
. She argues there’s been a resurgence of this material recently, which has shocked her, given how problematic she considers it.“It’s designed around themes of anti-Australiana, to be in dialogue with ideas of cultural cringe and the kitsch and the ironic and the uncanny in Australia,” she says. “Particularly thinking about the ways as an Aboriginal person I’ve inherited that literary culture, however complicatedly, with however much resistance is to be expected.
Her work also speaks to other aspects of Australian culture such as the poetry of Banjo Patterson, films such asAraluen is studying her PhD in contemporary Aboriginal literature - focussing on work by Alexis Wright, Melissa Lucashenko, Ellen van Neerven and Tara June Winch - and works part-time as an academic at Deakin University.
Despite having received a litany of awards, including 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, Araluen doesn’t see herself as a career writer. “My own writing is something I do right now and I do in the time that I’ve got available. I’m not one of those people who expects that I will always have something to say.
Even now, Araluen says she gets “very nervous about calling myself any kind of writer. Whenever I tell people I’m a poet, it creates a strange energy. Most of the time they don’t just believe you, or their version of being a poet is you sit in a dark room and scribble out work and no one ever reads it. People already have a perception about writing and writers anyway, that they’re not social, which is not true. And poetry is considered such a deviation from normal social behaviour ...
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