This week’s reading trail travels with award-winning Indigenous author, academic and activist Tony Birch as he describes writing his 2015 novel Ghost River, awarded the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, shortlisted for categories in that year’s NSW Premier’s Prize, Queensland Literary Awards and Adelaide Festival Awards, and longlisted for that year’s Miles Franklin.
Birch has published two more novels since then: The White Girl (winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing and shortlisted for that year’s Miles Franklin) and Women & Children (winner of the 2024 Age Fiction Book of the Year), as well as two collections of poetry (Broken Teeth and Whisper Songs) and two short story collections (Common People and Dark as Last Night).
Follow him further back to “The True History of Beruk” from Meanjin in 2006, and out through Tongan-Australian writer Winnie Dunn’s 2020 reading of The White Girl – along with work by Sisonke Msimang and Ruby Hamad – for her instalment of Australia in Three Books.
“The stories that I write reflect for me a reality,” Birch told Adelle Sefton-Rowston in a 2016 interview for Overland, “not in the sense of a nonfiction reality, but the reality of emotion I am trying to convey.”
Voting is now open for this year’s ABC Radio National Top 100 Australian Books.
Writing Ghost River – Tony Birch (2015)
The True History of Beruk (William Barak) – Tony Birch (2006)
Australia in Three Books: Winnie Dunn on Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country, Ruby Hamad’s White Tears Brown Scars, and Tony Birch’s The White Girl (2020)
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